


The Waste Land

by tfm



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-02
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-08 15:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 44
Words: 39,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of disturbingly familiar murders in Boston haunt the BAU, sending them to their physical and psychological limits. In the darkest of hours, not all of them will survive the journey. Part Three: George Foyet has returned, and he isn't going to let the BAU forget his legacy. Ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Coffin and the Killer

**The Waste Land**

_ ‘God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.’ _

**Voltaire**

_‘Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.’_

**T.S. Eliot**

Prologue – The Coffin and the Killer (Other)

 

It’s a box.

Not a conventional box, when it comes down to it, though. It’s made of expensive, polished wood, and it has a strange shape, but it’s a box nonetheless.

More specifically, it’s a coffin.

There’s a distinction between caskets and coffins. The coffin usually has a hexagonal shape, while the casket is rectangular, and often used for viewings. This particular coffin is definitive; it’s what you would expect a coffin to look life.

It’s a little smaller than they’d imagined. It feels so surreal to imagine that everything of this one person has been compressed to fit into that tiny box – every frown, every smile, every moment, shoved in and nailed shut. Of course, they have their own memories, but it will never be the same.

The wreath is a sharp contrast against the darkness of the wood. In its multi-colored glory, it’s the only bright thing in the room. Everything – everyone – else is a sea of dark colors. The funeral is as archetypal as the coffin.

There are sobs. Tears. Complete breakdowns.

They spend their days holding back the tears, holding back the emotion – it’s a coping mechanism. If they were to let it all out, every time, then there would be nothing left. Because they see so much. They experience so much. Death in all its incarnations. Chaos and misery reigning. Sometimes it’s hard to find a little brightness in amongst all the dark. The whispers of immortality go unheard.

Though it was unexpected, the team has been waiting for this day a long time. Some of them have become exceedingly pessimistic in nature; a side effect of the monstrosities they’ve seen. Every time they go outside, there’s a risk that one of them could die. They’ve all died a little bit inside – emotionally, speaking. But physically speaking, every shot fired, every person killed, they’ve made it out alive.

Until now.

This time, they had all come so close to death.

And one of them had crossed the line.

*          *          *

_2 weeks earlier._

It’s April, and it’s raining in Boston.

The knife isn’t in his hands; he knows she would see it before he could get the chance to slit her throat.

He has a calm, unassuming look on his face. A look that anyone would find themselves trusting, even though it’s after midnight, and there’s no-one else around. It’s a look that’s worked well for him in the past.

And it’s going to work well again tonight.

The rain inhibits his vision, but that doesn’t matter. He has practiced every slice, every thrust, so many times.

He hears the whir of the car as it desperately tries to cough into life. He sees the girl turn the key in the ignition, over and over again, frustrated. He smells the water that has tried so hard to wash away the world, feels it on every part of his body, tastes it as it rolls across his lips.

A murderer knocks on the car window. ‘Do you need a hand?’ he calls out.

The girl in the driver’s seat jumps. She’s not used to this kind of thing; she’s led a sheltered life. Looking at his face, she can’t see anything but concern. With only the slightest amount of hesitation, she rolls down the window.

‘It won’t start,’ she says, upset. ‘I need to be home by one a.m, and the car won’t start.’ There are tears in her eyes, dead cell phone in her limp hand.

He smiles at his luck.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says, and watches as she breathes a sigh of relief. She unbuckles her seatbelt and opens the car door. She needs to see what has trapped her here on this unforgiving night.

His hand slips into his pocket, curling about the knife.

He sees the look of shock as he plunges it into her chest. It’s shock at the fact that there’s a foreign object stuck inside her body. Shock at the fact that someone has just stabbed her, someone who looks so normal. She gives a tiny gasp as he pulls the knife out and a moan as he thrusts it back in.

The blood runs over his gloved hands, diluted by the water that’s falling from the sky.

When he’s finished, he walks calmly to the nearest payphone. The rain washes the blood from his clothes.

He speaks into the voice distorter. ‘I’ve killed another one,’ he says.

‘_Excuse me sir?’_

He smirks at the operator’s slightly panicked tone. In a neutral voice, he gives the address.

He can’t help but add his own little disclaimer, repeating the message that had shocked the operator. ‘This is the Reaper. I’ve killed another one.’

It’s April, and it’s raining in Boston.

 


	2. Home is Where the Heart Is

Part One: The Burial of the Dead

_‘All men would be tyrants if they could.’ _

**Daniel Defoe**

_‘April is the cruelest month, breeding  
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
Memory and desire, stirring  
Dull roots with spring rain.’_

**T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land **

Chapter One – Home is Where the Heart is (Reid)

Spencer Reid can remember a lot of things. He can recite the first nineteen thousand, three hundred and fifty-two digits of pi from memory, and on a slow day at Quantico, he had made it to six thousand before Morgan threw a book at his head. He can remember the DSM-IV definitions of countless psychological disorders, and has had direct experience of almost half of them. He can tell you that the process of eidetic memory involves continuing to see a representation of a visual stimulus some time after it has been removed. He can tell you that eidetic memory is more common in children, with as many as five cases in every hundred. He’ll add to that, with amusement in his voice, that some authorities say that eidetic memory in adults is much less common, with perhaps one in a million occurrences.

He’s special.

He doesn’t let you forget, but he doesn’t brag about it either. Sometimes, he wishes that he didn’t have an eidetic memory, that there are some things he would do anything to forget, but he never can. These memories span his entire life, but the most painful period – the period in which he didn’t really have a safety net, is his childhood. He’s grateful, then, that childhood amnesia is something that is experienced even by special people. By people like him.

Childhood amnesia refers to the inability to remember events from the first years of one’s life – more specifically, from birth to about three years of age. Procedural memory remains intact, but episodic and autobiographical memory is lost. Reid knows the theories behind childhood amnesia; one postulates that there are changes in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, paving the way for an explicit memory system rather than an implicit one. Another theory is that there are incompatibilities between the encoding of information, and the retrieval so many years down the track; before you can talk, you’re first to encode information non-verbally, while retrieval is usually a verbal process.

Spencer’s own uncharacteristically spotty recollection of his early years is a mixture of childhood amnesia, and repression. Though defense mechanisms were originally Freud’s work (and Reid has a _lot_ to say about Freud), they still have some significant bearing on his life today. Since his father came back into his life, he’s managed to cobble together a rough timeline of the first ten years.

Every single one of his life’s events have led Reid to this moment, where he’s standing in the bullpen with Morgan and Prentiss, completely unaware that everything is about to change.

‘So,’ grins Morgan. ‘Was he Mr. Right?’

Prentiss rolls her eyes. ‘The only person I’ve been with in the last year who’s had even the slightest chance of being Mr. Right turned out to be an Angel of Death. You remember the sheriff in Calhoun County?

‘I don’t think we’ll ever forget that one.’

Prentiss gives a slight laugh, though Reid can tell that it is forced. In the time that he has known her, Prentiss has had dozens of disastrous dates, very few of which have led to this level of crankiness. He watches analytically as she sniffs at the plastic-lidded cup that most certainly does not contain coffee.

‘Something wrong?’Morgan asks – he’s noticed it too, apparently.

She makes a face as she sips from the cup. It’s not a look of disgust so much as a look of resigned fate.

‘My doctor,’ she starts. ‘Says I have vitamin deficiencies, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Too much coffee, and too much crappy food at weird hours. Like we’re all going to die of heart attacks before we have a chance to get shot.’ She’s speaking with the low, mirthless tone of voice that Reid has come to associate with a bad mood.

‘Don’t go tempting fate, there,’ Morgan says, still grinning.

Curious, Reid asks, ‘So what’s the diet plan?’

‘Three well-balanced meals a day. Five servings of vegetables. Two servings of fruit. Cut down on the caffeine, starchy foods and, quote “vending machine crap.”’

 ‘I don’t think a smoothie is what he had in mind when he said “well-balanced meal,” Prentiss.’

She shrugs. ‘It’s high in dietary fiber, vitamins and antioxidants. I’d say it’s balanced enough.’

‘There are studies that have found many smoothies have more sugar than Coca-Cola,’ supplies Reid. He’s got his own drink in hand; secretly grateful _he _hasn’t been ordered off the caffeine. Yet. He thinks it’s probably only a matter of time. ‘Also, studies show that dieting can decrease tryptophan levels, resulting in crankiness.’

Emily raises an eyebrow. ‘Are you trying to say something there, Reid?’

‘Eat plenty of turkey,’ he says, shrugging. Evidently, though, that isn’t the answer Prentiss is looking for.

‘Hey,’ she says irritably. ‘At least I’m trying. And, I might add, if I’m having dietary problems, then the two of you are far worse off. I’m practically a health-nut compared to you guys.’

Morgan laughs. She’s in denial, Reid thinks. They would all swear under oath their healthy eating habits, right until the sugared-up coffee and three day old pastry was torn from their cold, dead hands.

‘You think I wish these abs into existence?’ Morgan asks, gesturing to the washboard stomach that isn’t quite visible beneath the t-shirt that he is wearing.

‘No, I think you do your thousand sit-ups every morning.’

Reid smiles at the banter between his colleagues. He had heard JJ once describe them as family, and, though he loves his mother dearly, he’s inclined to agree. He has never had any siblings, or anyone he could identify with. Though every member of the team is different in their own way, he finds some sense of solidarity between them.

They’ve all got their crosses to bear.

It’s those personal demons that have made them who they are today. Demons that make them just a little bit different from everyone else in the world. Demons that compel them to devote their lives to the job. That “personal life” thing that Reid has heard described so often, and yet hasn’t had a chance to experience it himself – he thinks it’s a myth. Because when it comes down to it, the job always comes first.

And they’re all okay with that.

It’s why when they see JJ, walking quickly towards them, a distressed look on her face, they’re ready to go. They’ve got their bags packed, their schedules otherwise cleared.

‘It’s bad?’ asks Reid, even though he doesn’t have to. The look on JJ’s face is enough to tell him that, yes; this is _very, very _bad.

‘The Reaper,’ she says, adding after a couple of seconds, ‘Foyet.’ But it had been unnecessary; the three agents are on the move before she’s even finished speaking.


	3. On the Shoulders of Giants

Chapter Two – On the Shoulders of Giants (Rossi)

When David Rossi thinks of his youth, he thinks of his days as a rookie in the FBI. To think about his childhood is another matter altogether; if you asked almost any other member of the team, they’d insist that he came out of the womb in his jeans and sports coat, with a smug look on his face. Hotch wouldn’t say that – of course, he is said to have been born in his suit anyway.

But contrary to popular belief, David Rossi was, in fact, subject to a childhood, and a relatively happy one at that. Fifty-three years, six months and nine days ago, Anthony and Maria Rossi immigrated to the USA, joining the half a million other Italian-born immigrants in New York state. Less than a month later, their third son, David was born.

David was a quiet child – as he often jokingly tells people, he never had the ego until he sold his first manuscript; it was all downhill from there.

One thing that David Rossi has had since childhood, though, is his ability to read people. He could always tell when his mother was upset, or when his father was angry, no matter how much they tried to hide it from their children. It wasn’t easy for first-generation immigrants to raise a family in this strange new place; both of his older brothers left school early in order to help support the family. It was a fate that Rossi was fortunate to avoid.

The young boy possessed an intelligence that was unmatched by any of his siblings; a sharp mind and quick wit that allowed him to become the first Rossi to graduate from an American institution of higher education. But he didn’t stop there.

David Rossi became a legend.

Successful though he was, Rossi never fails to remember the reason he had been able to come so far. He never fails to remember the sacrifices that had been made on his behalf.

Anthony and Maria Rossi eventually died, in the same neighborhood of Buffalo, NY that David Rossi had grown up in. A hundred times, the prodigal son had offered to buy them a house, to help support them in their old age – it was the least he could do. Each time, they refused.

With their deaths, Rossi thinks he might have temporarily forgotten the meaning of the word family. His siblings had spread, and though they tried to see each other as often as possible, it was difficult. It took a return to the BAU for him to remember what it was like to have a family.

Though they are not blood, there is some deeper kinship that binds them. Ties forged in the depths of hell. He knows these people like he knows himself.

It’s why, when he first sees the look on JJ’s face, he knows that things are definitely not good.

*          *          *

Morgan’s expression is one of barely concealed anger; George Foyet had humiliated the profiler the last time the team had been in Boston. Had mocked him with the possibility of death, and then never followed through. It was an exercise intended to shake the team’s foundations – to show them who was really in control. Though Morgan’s attack had unnerved them, they had not taken the notion seriously until Foyet had escaped from prison.

If Morgan is angry, then that is nothing compared to Hotch’s mood. The Unit Chief boasts an unusual mix of anger, guilt and anxiety, none of which is evident upon looking at his face. But Rossi knows Hotch better than most, and he knows that this is having a far more detrimental effect on the Unit Chief than he would ever admit.

It’s a misnomer to say that all profilers have memorable adversaries. Most of them seem to go ten, sometimes twenty years catching small-time serial killers – not necessarily the lowest of the low, but definitely not the high caliber ones. Not the killers that go for twenty years uncaught, taunting police and civilians alike. Those kinds of killers don’t come along very often.

Rossi has been posed the question of his greatest adversary many a time; usually he responds (in a smug tone) with the name of one of his ex-wives. It’s an answer that always seems to draw a few chuckles from the audience. Really, though, he thinks the idea of an adversary is a much more abstract concept. For David Rossi, his adversary is every case left unsolved, every killer left uncaught. It’s one of the reasons why, this time, he’s determined to bring George Foyet to justice.

‘Boston,’ JJ begins. ‘Less than two hours ago, police were called to this scene.’

The photos flash onto the projector screen. They’re not particularly gruesome photos – God knows they’ve seen far worse. The thing that terrifies them more than anything, though, is the symbol painted in blood that identifies this as a kill of the Reaper. The eye painted in blood; it almost seems to be mocking them.

‘Carrie Elliot, 19. Stabbed thirty-eight times, throat slit. Her body was found in her car in a back street. Police are still canvassing the neighborhood.’

‘Was there anything left at the scene?’ Hotch asks sharply, and it’s evident that Morgan too is burning for the answer. This case is unfinished business for both of them.

‘Nothing has been found yet,’ says JJ simply. ‘But the police are still looking.’

Rossi finds himself frowning. ‘He’s a narcissist. He wouldn’t leave Morgan’s credentials out of sight. He needs to make sure that they’re found.’

‘What are we saying?’ asks Prentiss, a frown starting to crease her own face. ‘That this is a copycat killer, or that Foyet kept the credentials for other reasons?’

‘It’s too early to say,’ concludes Hotch. ‘If it _is _Foyet, he could be playing with us – trying to test us. We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions just yet.’

He’s being cautious, Rossi knows – the last time Aaron Hotchner and George Foyet had crossed paths, Foyet had come out on top. There’s a look of determination on everyone’s face that this team will run themselves ragged to catch this guy, copycat or no.

‘It almost parallels Foyet’s actions with the ninth victim,’ Reid comments. ‘He took a personal item from the ninth victim, and didn’t leave it with the tenth, but with the eleventh.’

‘Only Foyet _was _the ninth victim,’ counters Morgan. ‘The circumstances aren’t exactly the same.’ His expression has deepened. In this case, _he _is the surviving victim. Rossi doesn’t think that Morgan likes being called a victim.

‘It’s something we need to consider though,’ reasons Prentiss, and Morgan isn’t about to argue.

‘Are there any links to Foyet’s previous victims?’ Reid asks aloud. This could be a personal thing.

Garcia, who is sitting beside Morgan, laptop at hand, strikes a few keys in rapid succession. ‘Nothing on the surface,’ she announces. ‘But I can run some deeper searches.’

‘You’ll have to do it remotely,’ says Hotch matter-of-factly. ‘You’re coming with us.’

Garcia is goggle-eyed at the order. It’s not often that she gets to escape the confines of her lair; the fact that Hotch wants her expertise at hand gives credence to the importance of the situation. Because even if it isn’t Foyet, Rossi knows the awful truth.

This isn’t going to be pretty.


	4. You Always Walk Alone

Chapter Three – You Always Walk Alone (Prentiss)

Emily Prentiss had not had the most conventional childhood.

It had been late on a Saturday night when Elizabeth Prentiss had felt her first contraction. Her first thought had been frustration – _did her child_ really _need to be coming_ now? She had sighed, and continued with her paperwork – surely she could get a little more of it done before a trip to the hospital was required. It had been well after midnight when Elizabeth quietly informed one of her assistants that she was having a baby and needed to be taken to the hospital immediately.

‘Should I call your husband?’ the underling had asked, unaware of the fury that was about to be unleashed upon him. On a good day, Ambassador Prentiss was not the best person to piss off, and on that day, when she had been hormonal, and experiencing agonizing abdominal pains, that day she had been diabolic.

‘Are you stupid? Do you know what will happen if you interrupt that meeting? You could be responsible for _nuclear war_.’

It had been a highly exaggerated argument, and one that always seemed to be highly censored upon retelling. The string of expletives that had accompanied the Ambassador’s declaration would not have been conducive to furthering her political career.

This practice of putting politics above family persisted until Emily Prentiss left home at the age of eighteen. She would have liked to say that she was emotionally mature by that point, but, like her childhood, her psychosocial development had not exactly been normal.

According to Erikson (and Prentiss’ undergraduate Psychology degree), Adolescence is a stage of Identity versus Role confusion, whereas Early Adulthood is a stage of Intimacy versus Isolation. She thinks that, on the whole, someone took her adolescence, and her early adulthood, and threw them into a blender.

They say money doesn’t buy happiness, and Prentiss wonders if whoever coined that phrase had been using her life as an example. As a child, all her material needs had been met, save for the one thing she desired most – companionship. Moving from place to place, learning a new culture, sometimes even a new language did not bode well for her social life.

Two of her closest friendships had been ruined by a stupid teenage mistake. Since then, there has been only one circumstance in which she has felt a bond that close. She’s with them now, talking about a young woman that had been brutally stabbed to death.

They talk about wound patterns, about offender types the way other people discuss what they’re having for lunch, or what’s on television that night. It all comes down to the profile; they’re looking for a sadist, a sociopath, an obsessive compulsive. It changes every time, and yet it’s always the same.

But not today.

Today things feel just that little bit more personal; Foyet isn’t just a nameless unsub to them. It does wonders for their motivation, but not much for their objectivity. They’ve all got that subconscious hope that they’ll be able to exact justice, lurking just below the surface. Because they’re the BAU – supposedly the finest minds in the FBI. And George Foyet had outsmarted them.

This time, they’re not going to pull any punches.

‘…if it is indeed a copycat, then we’re looking for someone who is of a similar type to Foyet; he’s male. Intelligent. Late thirties to early forties. Though he preys on everyone, he may be predisposed to certain rituals which are not found in the original crime, at which point it will become evident that we are dealing with a copycat.’ Reid’s saying what they are all aware of, as he is sometimes wont to. Prentiss thinks it’s cathartic for him; the endless recitation of facts and statistics that they may or may not already know.

‘Or it could be Foyet just messing with us,’ argues Morgan. It’s almost as though he _wants _it to be Foyet, just so he can get some kind of closure to his own personal demons. Prentiss doesn’t blame him.

Here, though, thirty-thousand feet in the air, and still half an hour away from Boston, they can do little but toss around theories. The first time they had hunted the Reaper, Reid had mentioned that the flight from D.C to Boston takes an average of forty minutes, flying commercially. He had almost recalculated to compensate for the speed of the jet and the fact that they were flying from Quantico, but Morgan had had the foresight to shut him up. Still, they’re so apprehensive now, so eager to hit the ground running that it feels like it’s taking ten times longer. It’s bad enough that dawn will not have broken by the time they land; precious hours that they could have spent working the case stolen away by darkness.

Hotch is giving out marching orders; ‘Garcia, Reid, victimology. Rossi and Prentiss, crime scene. Morgan, morgue. JJ and I will talk to the victim’s family as soon as we can.’ There a strangeness in his voice that would have been almost imperceptible to anyone else.

The part of Prentiss that is still Catholic knows a lot about guilt. Knows a lot about sin and confession. It knows about penance. She thinks that is what Hotch is doing; visiting the family of the victim is his penance. His way of trying to make up for the fact that he might have caused Carrie Elliot’s death.

The team isn’t going to tell him any different. They might try, but never will they be successful. They all know a lot about guilt. They all know that it isn’t going to go away simply because someone tells you it isn’t your fault.

Prentiss knows that as well as anyone. She has her own guilt about the past. Guilt that no amount of Hail Marys will ever wash away. Every once in a while, she finds herself  reciting the Act of Contrition under her breath, hears voices absolving her of her sins. Usually it’s Matthew’s voice.




‘_…ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen_.’

I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

No matter how many times she hears those words, it will never be enough. The sacrifices she makes every day to hunt down serial killers will never be enough.

It will never be enough.


	5. Look on the Bright Side of Life

Chapter Four – Look On the Bright Side of Life (Garcia)

_Quick, Entertaining, Charming, Youthful, Devoted, Multi-talented._

Those are a Gemini’s positive traits.

On the negative side of things, there’s _Capricious, Unpredictable, Inquisitive, Flirts._ Garcia’s not so sure why the last one is supposed to be negative. And she’s not quite sure if the first two really apply to her – or at least that’s what she tells herself. She’s eccentric, yes, but she wouldn’t equate that to unreliability. She’d like to believe in the positive traits.

She wants to believe in a lot of things.

She wants to believe that everything happens for a reason. She wants to believe that good always triumphs over evil. She wants to believe that all those people who seem as though they’re kind, honest, heartwarming folk really _are_ kind, honest and heartwarming. The trouble is, she’s been proven wrong a lot.

Every time she feels her mind teetering on the brink of pessimism, she thinks of the team. She thinks of the people who have become her family.

Your compatible signs for today; Love: Capricorn, Friendship: Leo.

Penelope Garcia was born to a Scorpio and a Cancer. More specifically, she was born to a hippie and a programmer in San Francisco in 1978. When she tells people now, they express their surprise at such an unlikely union. But then, not many people know that hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the cyberrevolution. That’s part of the reason why she always wears flowers in her hair.

Garcia’s birth father, Michael Alpert worked on the development of SQL until his daughter’s birth. Garcia thinks it’s ironic sometimes, considering what she does to databases these days. He’s the one who started her on the path to where she is today.

Michael Alpert died when Garcia was eight years old. She has a lot more in common with the team than they might think. Missing father figures is almost a prerequisite for joining the BAU.

Fortunately for Garcia though, her mother soon met and married Robert Garcia, the man who raised Garcia and her brothers as if they were his own.

Everything happens for a reason.

That’s the mantra Garcia repeats to herself at her father’s funeral. Her mother’s funeral. Her stepfather’s funeral. Surely their deaths must hold some greater purpose? Surely they can’t have been ripped from this earth for no good reason? She doesn’t think she could handle knowing that it’s all for nothing.

Lucky numbers: 3, 11, 24, 31, 35, 42.

She and Reid are the only two FBI employees sitting at the long, squircular table. Half a dozen Bostonian police officers are milling around, though their actions go unnoticed by the two agents. They’ve got much more important things on their minds.

It’s a little bit past seven a.m; they’ve been doing this for almost an hour, and have had no significant breakthroughs. Victimology is difficult when your unsub has no inhibitions, no remorse. He’ll kill anyone and everyone if they give him the chance. Still, it’s not something that they can ignore.

They can’t afford to miss anything. Not this time.

Technically speaking, they hadn’t missed anything last time either; Foyet’s escaped had occurred when they were back at Quantico, reveling in the solving of the ten-year cold case. It’s not as though they could have done a single thing about it.

With every new bit of information that Garcia calls out, Reid adds another dot point to their victim profile in a red whiteboard marker. It’s not often she gets to work with the team like this. Usually she’s on the other end of a phone line, or a webcam. While she admits, she enjoys their company, she’s not quite sure whether she would prefer being back at Quantico, _away_ from all of this, shielded by the 400 odd miles between there and Boston.

She has her defense mechanisms. They all do. Hers are a little more obvious, a little more aesthetic. Bright splashes of color. Extravagant pens. 15 gigabytes of baby animal photos. Sometimes it isn’t enough to counter the horror.

_It is likely that you will tend towards nervous tension today, thanks to a Mercury/moon combination, which is likely to last well into the evening. It may be that work or school is demanding too much at the moment, so make sure you book a therapeutic pampering session to ease those knotted muscles!_

‘Played the trombone in her high school marching band…Is that really relevant?’

‘I doubt it,’ admits Reid. He doesn’t add this tidbit of information to their list. Garcia knows he’ll remember it if it comes in useful later, however unlikely that may be.

So far they don’t have much; Carrie Elliot, nineteen years old, sophomore at BU. Lives – lived – with her parents and sister. Owns – owned – a cat. Thinking about victims in the past tense is always painful. These are the people they were too late to save. Carrie Elliot will never again speak to her parents, or tease her sister, or feed her cat. She’ll never again oversleep and miss an early class, or fail a paper that she spent three weeks on.

Garcia has learnt to value the little things.

Now, she’s running a cross-check. Every single piece of information about Carrie Elliot referenced against the files of the Reaper’s previous victims. There are a lot of files, and even for a city like Boston, there will probably be some non-significant overlap. That’s data collection for you. Spend hours collating the results, and it still ends up being non-significant.

All she’s looking for is something – anything – that will help them profile this guy’s next move. Last time, he had been one step ahead without them even realizing it – the step that let him escape from prison.

They just have to make sure that this time, they’re ahead of the game.

And that’s something Garcia can believe in.


	6. Small Town Girl

Chapter Five – Small Town Girl (JJ)

Jennifer Jareau would have once said that she had a normal childhood. Now, though… now she knows that really, there’s no such thing as normal. The best that she can say is that she didn’t have a traumatic childhood, and she has turned out relatively sane so far. Relatively undamaged.

In a way, it’s a burden, though she would never go as far as to call it that. It means that she hasn’t generated the support mechanisms that her colleagues have. She never learnt how to deal with loss, or emotional pain, or physical pain.  Not like they did.

JJ learnt other things. She learnt that the woods can be a pretty damn terrifying place when you’re seven years old, and it’s the middle of the night. She learnt that if you live in a small town, then the last thing you should do is sleep with the quarterback, because by morning, _everyone _will know. She learnt to score a goal from eighty yards out, though she hasn’t played soccer in a _very _long time. She’s moved on to kicking down doors instead.

The soccer was good for one thing, though, at least. It got her into college, and college got her into the FBI. It hadn’t been the most conventional way of getting out of East Allegheny, but it had worked out in the end. Instead of living in that dead-end town that doesn’t even have a bowling alley, Jennifer Jareau spends her days deciding who gets to live, and who gets to die.

That’s what it boils down to in the end. Choose one case in favor of another, and suddenly you’ve got half a dozen more bodies on your conscience.

Sometimes, she doubts.

Doubts that she made the right decision. Doubts that she is the right person to assume the role of fate. Doubts that she’s even cut out for this job.

But she perseveres.

She has those support mechanisms now. The friends – the family – that are there for her when she’s not quite sure she can cope. The family that will give her confidence just by being in the same room. Sometimes she pities the people that don’t have that kind of strength behind them. She does her best to help them, but it’s never enough. You can only be helped along so far before you have to step out on your own two feet.

That’s where JJ is now, comforting the mother and father of Carrie Elliot. Here lived a girl who took every opportunity given to her, stolen away by some narcissist with a point to prove. In some way, JJ feels a connection with the dead girl. Not that she will ever let anyone know that.  She may not have skeletons in her closet, but she’s hiding far more things than they would ever guess.

Tears flow unfettered down the cheeks of Catherine Elliot.

Since Henry’s birth, JJ has taken the deaths of children that much harder. Now she doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to be a mother. She doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to lose a child – she has that nightmare far too often to forget it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the stony expression on Hotch’s face as he asks Mrs. Elliot about her daughter’s usual routine. Through the mother’s choked sobs, JJ manages to comprehend that Carrie had not done anything out of the ordinary the night of her murder.

JJ wants to assure the woman that they will stop Carrie’s murderer from killing any more people, but that is a promise she knows she can’t keep. The best they can do is try their hardest to make sure it doesn’t turn into a complete massacre.

Hopefully, it will be enough.

*          *          *

They leave the Elliot residence with little more than they started with. With an unsub like theirs, victimology will be tenuous at best. In this case, it was just as much a chance for them to assure the family that _something_ was being done.

They’ll go back to the station now, and work on victimology and the profile, though they aren’t quite sure either of those things will be of any use. If it’s Foyet, then they already have a profile, already have victimology. If it isn’t, then they don’t have enough to work with. That’s what frustrates JJ sometimes. They don’t have good cases and bad cases; they have bad cases and _very_ bad cases.

Sometimes they’ll get a kidnapping case that doesn’t end up completely horrible – instead of half a dozen corpses, they’ll just have a child that’s traumatized for life. Those cases a few and far between, though. It’s no wonder they’re all burnt out. The closest thing JJ’s had to a vacation in the past five years is maternity leave. She doesn’t even want to think about everyone else’s history; if she recalls correctly, Hotch might have taken a weekend off, around six years ago.

This is the price they pay for saving the world every day.

Not bad, for a small town girl.


	7. Best Served Cold

Chapter Six – Best Served Cold (Morgan)

Derek Morgan is no stranger to death.

He doesn’t officially keep a list, but he can remember every single death that he has seen, starting with that of his father. Morgan had been ten years old when he accompanied his father, Christopher Morgan, to the local corner store to buy bread and milk. Christopher never made it home.

Though it has been over twenty years, Morgan still remembers the men yelling at them to get down. Remembers his father’s voice as he tried to reason with the robbers. Remembers the gun-shot, the screams, the blood.

At the funeral, Morgan was silent, as people he barely knew – some he’d never even met before – told him that his father was a hero. But that didn’t make sense to Morgan. His father was dead. Heroes weren’t supposed to die.

After that day, Morgan was never quite the same. He went through things that no child should ever have to experience. And yet all of those things made him the man he is today. That an irony they can all apply to their past. Upsetting, for some of them, but without that influence, they would just be another I.T worker, or another stockbroker.

He never set out to be like his father. He might have oft been accused of trying to play the hero, but he had never really considered himself one. He’d never even considered the thought until a victim they had saved called him one. And that, more than anything, made him remember just how dangerous the job was. They go out there every day, risking their lives. A great deal less courageous, he thinks, than then people who lose their lives for no reason at all.

He’s staring at the body. He doesn’t know her. He’s never met her before in his life, and yet he can say with some certainty that she didn’t deserve this fate. Didn’t to be stabbed, to have her throat slit in the middle of the night by a complete stranger. She deserved something more.

It’s a little past ten a.m. The autopsy had been fast tracked. The fact that an autopsy was even needed confused Morgan. The Medical Examiner had explained to him how the Boston Police Department don’t want any stone left unturned; Foyet had given them the run-around last time – they don’t want to give him the same satisfaction.

Cause of death: Thirty-eight stab wounds, throat slit.

Manner of death: Homicide.

Mechanism of death: Exsanguination.

That’s what Morgan manages to glean from the technical information given him. He’s sure that Reid probably would have done a better job understanding, but that’s not an issue. They’ll get the official autopsy report later. The proceedings have told them one highly important thing; so far, the killer is using the same techniques as Foyet. There’re no drugs, no hidden surprises. It’s either Foyet, or a copycat that hasn’t quite had the chance to shine.

A burst of anger flows through him at the thought of Foyet. Arrogant son-of-a-bitch that thinks he can play the team, can play Morgan. It’s not going to happen this time. They’re not going to let him get away. Morgan would be lying if he said he wasn’t looking forward to seeing the look in Foyet’s eyes as he was cuffed. Would be lying even more if he said he didn’t want to put a bullet right between those eyes. He won’t, though. Not unless he has to. He’s not going to throw away everything he’s worked for, for some petty revenge scheme. No matter how much he wants to.

He’s not that guy.

He drives back to the police station in silence. There’s something in his pocket, pressing hard against his leg. It’s a bullet. More specifically, it’s the bullet that George Foyet left him on their first encounter. The encounter that left Morgan unconscious. The encounter that left him doubting himself, doubting the job.

If they fail again, he doesn’t know if he can keep going.

*          *          *

‘Hey there, hot stuff.’ Garcia greets him with a grin, in spite of the circumstances. She and Reid are the only ones there – it’s barely past eleven. The others won’t be back for a while.

‘Anything?’ Morgan asks hopefully. Garcia shakes her head sadly in reply. Reid says nothing. He’s staring at the board in silence, occasionally flipping back to the file.

‘It’s so impersonal,’ the younger profiler says eventually. Morgan raises an eyebrow. It’s not like Reid to be having qualms about death. He’s not. ‘Foyet’s a narcissist. We caught him. He would want us to know that he returned. He would just kill a teenage girl – he’d make it personal.’

‘So...’ starts Morgan. ‘It’s a copycat.’

‘I think so.’

And Morgan isn’t quite sure what he wants to think about that.


	8. An Eye for an Eye

Chapter Seven – An Eye for an Eye (Hotch)

For Aaron Hotchner, George Foyet is the one that got away. He would find the fact amusing, if it wasn’t so macabre; the phrase is usually applied to a lover or someone with significant romantic ties. It doesn’t help that the only relationship he’s ever really had ended the way it did. He is married to the job; his wife had merely been a mistress. In this circumstance, “the one that got away” is the serial killer that evaded Hotch’s grasp not once, but twice. If he were to ask anyone else, they would tell him that neither time had been his fault, but Hotch would argue that he should have foreseen it.

Whenever someone asks Hotch about his career before the BAU, he gives such a list of vocations that some question whether or not he is in possession of a time machine. The truth is much simpler, yet far more haunting.

Aaron Hotchner is dedicated to the idea of justice.

As a prosecutor, he never had the chance to stop the cases before they reached the courtroom, a fact he attempted to amend by joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once in the Bureau, he found himself working on his skill set; become a bizarro Renaissance man, in a sense. This dedication, this driving force is the reason why his marriage broke down. The reason why he barely sees his son once a week. It was a sacrifice that Hotch did not want to make, and yet it was thrust upon him.

Every one of those sacrifices was made so that Hotch could make the world a better place. Only he’s not so sure that it’s working.

Hotch did not have the happiest childhood. He’s got the scars – both mental and physical – to prove it. He’s got the nightmares, the times that he jerks himself awake at three o’clock in the morning. Sometimes the nightmares are about cases. Sometimes they’re not. He wants to make sure that in twenty years time, his own son won’t find himself waking in a cold sweat. But all that effort amounts to nothing if George Foyet gets away.

And that, more than anything, is the reason why Hotch is so upset when Reid explains his theory. It means that there is a monster still out there. A monster who, in time, will terrorise and kill again, all because _he_ failed.

It’s not a happy thought.

And it puts them in the worst position possible. It’s been twelve hours since Carrie Elliot’s death, and with only one victim, they cannot provide an accurate profile. All they can do for now, is throw around possibilities.

‘It might not be a copycat, in all technicalities of the word,’ suggests Reid. ‘It could be that someone wanting to kill Carrie Elliot could just be using the Reaper’s M.O. to cover his tracks. Did she have any enemies?’

‘Not that her mother knew of,’ answers JJ. ‘We should talk to her friends, though. I know for a fact that teenage girls don’t tell their mother everything.’ She and Garcia share a short laugh, though Hotch can tell that there is no humor in it. Not today.

Rossi and Prentiss are still at the crime scene, waiting for forensics to finish so they can conduct their own analysis of the area. That leaves JJ and Hotch to talk to Carrie’s friends, and Reid and Garcia to continue with their quasi-victimology. There’s not much else that can be done.

*          *          *

‘Why did you let him get away in the first place?’

The words sting, a confirmation of Hotch’s worst fears. That this is all his fault, that he killed Carrie Elliot the way he killed six people the last time the Reaper was in town. JJ puts a hand on Hotch’s back, though makes not other outward gesture.

‘Is there anyone who might have held a grudge against Carrie? An enemy? A stalker? Anyone who would have had an excuse to kill her.’

Amelia Sternberg is nineteen years old and Carrie Elliot’s best friend. Her face is streaked with tears, every drop of that salty liquid just another reminder to Hotch. A reminder of his failure, of putting his pride above everything else. How many lives ruined now, because he refused to take a deal. It doesn’t matter that it might be a copycat, that sinking feeling still remains.

No enemies. No-one that would want to kill her. No skeletons in the closet. As macabre as it sounds, it’s not what they want to hear. Because while it means that Carrie Elliot was an upstanding citizen, an intelligent person who didn’t make enemies easily, it also means that they have no leads, nothing to tell them where they should start looking next.

‘We should talk to the rest of her friends,’ JJ says firmly. Hotch nods, giving no response. After a few seconds, JJ continues. ‘Don’t let the guilt take you over.’ Again, Hotch says nothing.

He’s not letting go of this one any time soon.


	9. Sounds of Life and Death

Chapter Eight – Sounds of Life and Death (Rossi)

David Rossi has seen a lot of things at crime scenes. He’s seen corpses burnt beyond recognition, corpses drained of all blood. He’s seen things that were once human beings, tortured to death – put through agonies that their bodies were not designed to cope with.

This particular crime scene looks so...normal. Were it not for the yellow tape surrounding the scene, the clusters of people with magnifying glasses and tweezers, and the blood-red eye painted on the car window, he would not have given this scene a second thought.

They’d spent the morning canvassing the area, asking local residents if they saw or heard anything. A few had heard some noises outside at around 1a.m, but thought nothing of it.

‘It’s strange,’ Prentiss had commented. ‘The Reaper likes to kill in isolated areas. Even if this is a copycat, you’d think he would have implemented that part of the M.O. as well.’

It’s raining. Spitting, really. It’s just enough to make the day feel miserable, but not quite enough to be a nuisance. To be a nuisance to anyone other than the CSIs, that is; they’re working quickly, not wanting the rain to contaminate evidence. Both Rossi and Prentiss know that it probably won’t make a difference – if this guy’s smart enough, then he won’t have them left anything worthwhile. But that’s okay. They’ll learn other things from working the crime scene.

‘It could be intentional,’ says Rossi eventually, watching as the CSIs slowly pack up their gear. One of the investigators is heading their way, intent on revealing his findings. ‘The copycat’s own spin on things. His own M.O.’

No case breaking evidence found. More to come when trace evidence is processed. Rossi nods.

They duck under the crime scene tape, not having to worry about leaving footprints behind. The car is still there, waiting to be towed back to the crime lab. Seeing the scene now, Rossi realizes just how out in the open the car is.

‘No-one heard any sirens, so he didn’t pull her over. Tires are intact. How did he get her to stop?’

Rossi leans in the window of the car, and tests the ignition with a gloved hand. He hears the whirring of the engine.

‘Car broke down,’ Rossi says. ‘But how did he know it was going to break down?’

‘Unless he tampered with the engine – made sure that she could only drive a few blocks before the car broke down.’

‘Which means he followed her.’

‘But why her? Out of all the people in Boston...It seems a little arbitrary.’

‘Missing white girl syndrome. He killed her because people would care,’ muses Rossi. ‘Killing her in a residential neighbourhood. This guy is looking for attention. He’s capitalising on Foyet’s infamy. I think we’re definitely dealing with a copycat here.’

Prentiss nods. ‘We need to speak to the people Carrie was with last night,’ she says decidedly.

*          *          *

The girl taps her fingers against the textbook in a staccato rhythm. Tears stain her cheeks.

‘We’ve got finals in May. She was so freaked out. Didn’t want to fail. We were spending every night at the library, studying our asses off. Amelia was supposed to be with us last night, but she wasn’t feeling well.’

Rossi knows about Amelia Sternberg. Prentiss had called Hotch whilst they were in transit, informing him of their suspicions. Great minds think alike. Hotch and JJ are going to talk to the rest of Callie’s friends. Rossi and Prentiss are talking to the last person who saw her; Sarah Lehane.

‘Did you see anyone suspicious?’ Prentiss asks, pen hovering over her notebook. ‘Anyone who might have been following you?’

‘There was a guy hanging around the parking lot, I think, but he left as soon as we got there. Oh God – do you think he killed her?’ Sarah’s expression immediately jumps from sadness to horror. The thought that she had been in such close proximity to a murderer without even noticing it is a haunting one.

‘It’s possible,’ says Rossi shortly. ‘Could you give us a description?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sarah shakes her head slightly. ‘It was raining, he had a hood on. I guess...he was around 6’4”...maybe white? I don’t know,’ she says again. The tears are flowing more freely now. Looking sideways, Rossi can see a stoic expression on Prentiss’ face.

‘Why is this happening?’ Sarah whispers.

Rossi doesn’t answer. He’s seen a lot of death in his time, and it rarely ever makes sense.

Not really.


	10. The Profile

Chapter Nine – The Profile (Other)

The team find themselves all together at the police station at around five o’clock in the evening, ready to give their preliminary profile. They’ve spent the day talking to witnesses and friends of the victim, looking at bodies, looking at crime scenes, sorting through victimology. It’s time to start putting all those puzzle pieces together.

‘We’re looking for a white male, between the ages of thirty and forty,’ begins Hotch. They had re-evaluated their first impressions with every step of the investigation. Every interview, every task taking them a tiny bit further in narrowing down the profile.

‘He’s narcissistic,’ continues Reid. ‘Looking for attention. His own crimes weren’t drawing the attention he desired, so he decided to imitate one of Boston’s most infamous serial killers.’

Emily steps forward, hands wringing. ‘He most likely has killed before, but he either wasn’t suspected, or police dismissed him as a suspect.’

Their words flow together, as if they are not really five people, but an entity with five different parts. They don’t practice this. The way they finish each other’s sentences is a skill based upon every single case they’ve worked together, which, in retrospect, isn’t that many. It isn’t yet numbering in the hundreds, or the thousands. The victim count is, but that’s another story altogether.

The fact of the matter is, their lives are based so solely upon their work that their colleagues have become extensions of themselves. Like a limb or an organ, their colleagues are something they rely upon to survive, something they use as part of their daily functions. They are part of an organic society, each mechanism essential to the overall workings of the machine. Without any one member, they are diminished as a group. Each person has a role.

Rossi speaks next, giving off that air of casual confidence. ‘He probably works a menial job, one where his skills go unrecognized. He’s looking for the attention that he believes that he rightfully deserves.’

Morgan takes over. ‘Due to his narcissistic nature, we believe that he may attempt to contact either the media, or the police at one point – to tell us that _he_ is the one committing the crimes. All of this is worth nothing to him if the Reaper gets all the credit.’

It’s going full circle, as Hotch concludes the profile. ‘It is likely that his crimes will escalate in violence until he achieves the notoriety that he believes he is worthy of.’

The police officers filter out of the conference room, leaving only the BAU agents. Without any viable suspects, the profile isn’t really anything to go on. They’ll trawl through unsolved cases, looking for anyone that might fit their bill.

Until they find someone though, the streets of Boston are not a very safe place to be.


	11. Sunshine and Lollipops

Chapter Ten – Sunshine and Lollipops (Garcia)

It’s late. The team has spent the evening at the police station, going over unsolved murders, looking for a case that fits the profile. The problem is, they can’t be sure what kind of victim their unsub likes to go for; is he a preferential offender? An equal opportunities offender? They don’t know.

That makes their task all the more difficult.

Garcia knows the awful truth; each year, thousands of people get away with murder. No matter how well they do their jobs, no matter how many hours they work, how many dates they postpone, how many hours of sleep they lose, there will still always be someone else out there killing. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to give up.

Even now, they’re still working. Hotch had all but ordered them to go, get dinner. In the eighteen hours they’ve been in Boston, none of them have eaten. Somehow this case supersedes the need for food, for water, for air.

Hotch had all but shepherded them out of the station. Curiously enough, Rossi refused, and Garcia gets the feeling that the oldest member of the team is going to play the psychologist fielding Hotch’s guilt.

They’re at a diner recommended to them by one of the detectives (‘Best pancakes within fifty blocks’) and the atmosphere is somewhat dark. None of them are in a particularly “sunshine and lollipops” mood.

Garcia stares down the waitress that is flirting with her hunk o’ spunk. They always seem to flirt. She doesn’t know why. It must be something to do with the pheromones that he excretes. Colleen, as she is so labelled by her nametag, seems fairly interested in the subject of criminology, to the point where standing around and having a conversation with the FBI agents is fair game. After all, they’re the only people in the diner.

‘So why is it that men kill more than women?’ Her eyelids flutter flirtatiously, and Garcia’s not sure if “Colleen” is more interested in the answer to the question, or the person she wants answering it.

‘Chocolate,’ mutters Prentiss under her breath stabbing at her salad with a fork. At their amused looks, she elaborates. ‘Seriously, three days on this stupid diet, and I’m about ready to kill someone.’

‘Actually, women are more prone to internalized anger, whereas men are more likely to vent their anger using aggression,’ supplies Reid. To Garcia’s surprise, the waitress’ attention has now jumped from Morgan to Reid. Apparently it _is_ the criminology that she’s interested in.

The young genius winces, having felt Prentiss’ foot connect with his shin underneath the table.

‘How’s that for internalized anger?’

Reid stares at the salad. ‘You do realize that “well-balanced” meals doesn’t mean you need to have salad all the time. It’s about “balance.”’ He says it as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But then, they’re profilers; while they see the intricacies of every situation, sometimes they’re blind to what’s right in front of them. Whether that has to do with salads, or the fact that they’re all on a downward spiral is neither here nor there.

Prentiss shrugs, staring at a lettuce leaf.

“Over-compensating,” he mouths silently, to the amusement of both Morgan and Colleen.

JJ slides back into the booth, having just returned from the rest-room. Garcia shifts her laptop to accommodate the media liaison.

‘Have we looked at assaults?’ asks Prentiss, suddenly becoming all business. ‘He could have escalated _into_ murder, rather than just changing his M.O.’

Garcia grimaces. If there are a lot of unsolved murders, there are just as many unsolved assaults. She’s come to the conclusion that they won’t be able to solve this case without more information.

As if the devil’s ears were burning, the loud beep the laptop suddenly emits makes them all jump.

‘What is it?’ asks JJ tersely.

Garcia’s eyes grow wider as she scans the window that has just popped up. She’s got alerts on 911 – any time the word Reaper is mentioned in a call, she gets a pop-up. She’s got one now.

‘911,’ she says, ‘Reaper.’ She swivels the screen so that the rest of them can see.

_This is the Reaper. I’ve killed another one_.

Two minutes ago. Two blocks from here.

‘We have to go,’ says Morgan, standing quickly. His hand is unconsciously resting on his Glock. They’re all on the move in less than thirty seconds.

‘Stay here,’ Morgan instructs Garcia. ‘Call Hotch, tell him we’re in pursuit.’

‘But…you don’t have your vests,’ Garcia calls out to their backs.

It’s too late.

They’re already gone.


	12. On the Run

Chapter Eleven – On the Run (JJ)

Rain is good for a lot of things. It helps plants and crops grow. It replenishes dams and reservoirs. It washes the world clean. What it _isn’t _good for, however, is chasing after an unsub.

It’s pelting down rain, which is not unusual for Boston in the middle of April. In fact, precipitation in any form in Boston is a commonality; the low pressure Nor’easter system off the east coast of the Continental United States is responsible for an average of eighty inches of snow and rain per year. It’s rained all day, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it. Their job doesn’t stop when it starts raining. They’re like postmen, except with guns. Come rain, sleet or snow, they’re out there, catching the bad guys.

Jennifer Jareau hasn’t run like this in a long time. In any other circumstances, she might have relished the rapid beating of her heart, the way she felt so...alive. In a way, it almost mimics the adrenaline of varsity soccer, but instead of running towards the goal-posts, she’s running towards something that’s a fair bit more ominous. It’s the same principle in the end though; score the goal, catch the unsub.

Win.

To be more specific, in this case, it’s get to the scene before the unsub leaves. Logically speaking, it should be too late; the unsub should have long fled. But JJ isn’t letting go of hope.

With a start, she realizes that she is ahead of her colleagues. Of the team, she and Morgan are probably the most athletic, and she’s pretty sure that Morgan’s athleticism is more about muscle than speed. That doesn’t prevent him from being just feet behind her, though.

It feels like hours since they’ve left the diner, each moment weighing heavily on their soul. In reality, it hasn’t been more than a couple of minutes. A couple of minutes between learning of the 911 call, and arriving on scene. In any other circumstance, congratulations might have been in order. As it stands, though, they’ve got a dead body fifty feet ahead of them and no unsub in sight.

To her left, JJ sees the park. It’s the perfect place to get lost in, the trees and the rain culminating in a treacherous path.

‘I’ll check the victim,’ she yells, indicating that the others should do a perimeter search for the unsub. Crack shot though she is, field work is more the expertise of the profilers. After a few seconds, it becomes blindingly clear that she’s exactly where she needs to be.

Their victim is still alive.

The fact that the unsub didn’t ensure the victim was dead should set warning bells off, but she’s too busy trying to save a life.

It’s a young woman, around JJ’s age. Her hair might be dark, but it’s difficult to tell when it’s so wet. Her eyes are closed, and blood is spilling from her chest. JJ can’t quite count the number of stab wounds that have torn through the sweater. It’s at least ten, probably a lot more. Some seem to have merged, a criss-cross of tears that only serve to remind her of how hopeless it seems.

Blinking water from her eyes, JJ pulls out her cell phone, one-handed. Her other hand is trying to stem the blood flow. She isn’t even looking at the phone as she dials 911. In her time as an FBI agent, she’s called for an ambulance dozens of times. It’s never felt this close. She’s never felt the kind of urgency that she does tonight, as a young woman’s life slips away beneath her fingertips.

She didn’t sign up for this.

It’s always been about saving the victims, not watching them die right in front of her. _If you stop caring, you’re jaded. If you care too much, it’ll ruin you._ Right now, she can’t not care. She can’t let go of the fact that there’s someone who’s bleeding to death, because they haven’t caught this guy yet.

No. Not bleeding to death.

Dead.

She can’t feel the slow beat of the heart any more, can’t see the rise and fall of the chest. With a blood finger, she checks the pulse at the carotid artery. Nothing.

How many is that now?

How many people dead because of a sadistic killer, or a psychopath? Is it more, or less than the number of people they’ve saved? Probably more. _Definitely_ more. Sometimes there’s nothing they can do to save the first victims, and they don’t always get there in time to save the last.

_It’s still better to care._

Hotch’s words echo in her mind as she pulls away, letting the rain wash the blood from her hands.

_It’s never perfect._

In the distance, she can hear the sirens of the ambulance. They’re loud, but not so loud that they block out the noises closer to home. A foot stepping into a puddle. It’s a sign that things are about to go very wrong. It can’t be one of the others – they know better than to sneak up on her in a situation like this.

She turns, gun hand already unsnapping the holster.

It’s too late. He’s already made his move.

She feels the knife pierce her side, and she blinks, as if unable to comprehend what has just happened. With blurred eyes, she sees the masked figure retreat.

_Is he going to keep going? Finish the job?_

If he’s planning on it, then JJ won’t be privy to the details. She’s already closing her eyes on this world. Lost to the darkness.

It’s never perfect.


	13. Minimal Loss

Chapter Twelve – Minimal Loss (Prentiss)

It’s dark, and it’s wet, and Prentiss can barely see twenty feet in front of her. Part of her thinks that this chase is a wash-out. That running through the trees, and across the muddy ground, and over slippery rocks is all a waste of time – there’s no indication that the unsub actually went this way, it’s simply their best approximation. Profiling minds at work.

Reid is off to her right somewhere, and Morgan had gone in the opposite direction, in the hopes that at least one of them will be able to determine just where this unsub has gone. Already, the events of tonight tell them a little more about the man that is stalking the Boston streets. A little bit more added to the profile. That’s not really something to think about now, though.

She can hear the sirens piercing through the pounding of the rain, and the pounding of her own heart. If nothing else, it means that back-up might be here soon. That maybe they have the slimmest chance of catching this guy before he kills anyone else.

Part of her wonders still if any of it really matters. At the end of the day, no matter how many killers they’ve caught, how many unsubs they’ve identified and thrown into jail cells, there is still someone else out there to find. Still evil in the world. And they don’t have a single hope at stopping it all.

Not enough to absolve her sins, not enough to vanquish evil. This leaves one question.

Why?

Why do they do this? Why do they go out and hunt evil every day if there’s no chance of stopping it?

Because it does matter.

Every victim they save, every life they protect is another point to the scoreboard. But they can’t save them all. It’s that minimal loss thing all over again.

When she stops running, it’s instinct that makes her stop. It’s not that she heard something, or saw something, or used any real logic to justify halting the chase. It’s just a sinking gut feeling.

So she turns carefully, not wanting to slip on the rocks, blinking water out of her eyes. Trying to see through the darkness. Her weapon is raised, ready to put a bullet into anything that isn’t Morgan, or Reid should the need arise. Of course, it could be a civilian that just so happens to be out here in the pouring rain, but she doesn’t think that’s likely.

‘Reid?’ she calls out. ‘Morgan?’ Because if it’s either of them, then she sure as hell wants to know.

She sees the movement out of the corner of her eye. It’s coming fast, not enough time for her to line up the sights of her Glock with this mysterious target, but enough time for her to defend herself.

She deflects the hand carrying the knife, noticing vaguely that the shining silver is marred by blood. Whose blood, she’s not quite sure. In any case, the knife spins to the ground, as does the Glock. She doesn’t have a chance to move for either of them before he’s on top of her.

It’s their unsub, of that she’s sure. He’s wearing the same kind of mask Foyet did, so she can’t see his face, but none of that matters when you’re fighting for your life. He’s got at least fifty pounds on her, most of it muscle. She’s got her FBI training and thirty-seven years worth of life skills, but not much else. He’s on top of her, trying to pummel his fists into her face.

Grabbing at his fists is all she can do to stop him from punching her.

‘Emily?’ She can hear Reid’s voice calling, muffled by the sound of the rain. It’s enough to momentarily distract her assailant. Enough for her to push past his attack, and gain the advantage. She rips off the mask, as if knowing his identity will somehow be enough to cement the fact that they’ve gotten rid of one more killer.

It’s an average face. Dark hair, dark eyes.

And he’s smiling.

She doesn’t even have the chance to comprehend the reason _why_ he’s smiling. Already he’s flipping them back over, slamming her head onto the ground. Onto the rocks.

It’s a minimal loss.


	14. Betting Against the House

Chapter Thirteen – Betting Against the House (Reid)

Reid blinks past the rain that is slicking his hair against his head.

The Emerald Necklace is a chain of parks linked by parkways and waterways. In total, there is over 1,100 acres of parkland there. That’s a lot of ground for them to cover in the dead of the night when it’s pouring down rain. A lot of ground in which the unsub can slip from their grasp, only to kill again.

Nevada doesn’t get as much rain as Massachusetts. Most of the rain that does fall hits the lee side of the Sierra Nevada Range. All in all, this amounts to an average annual rainfall of 7 inches.

Reid has memories of sitting by his bedroom window, reading Sartre as the rain pounded against the window. It seems so far in the past now. Sometimes he still sits at the window, reading, as the rain pelts down. Considering D.C’s climate, it should be a far more common occurrence, but lately, Reid finds that speed-reader or not, he’s found less and less time to simply sit down and read a book for pleasure.

He stops running.

Was that Prentiss calling his name?

It’s hard to tell, the way the rain overwhelms his senses. He can identify every single mechanism of the human ear; the auditory canal, cochlea, oval window, round window. The list goes on. All those little things that tell Spencer Reid that he definitely heard Prentiss calling his name.

He turns, running back. She hadn’t been too far behind him – about twenty feet when they had first started out. He’s not so sure why he had ended up in front.

It’s less than a minute before he discovers that yes, Prentiss had called out. That she had called out because she found herself grappling with their unsub.

‘Emily,’ he calls out, partially to give her a distraction, but partially so she knows that he’s there to help. He levels his gun in the direction of the scuffle. He can’t fire immediately; not when there’s no distance between them. The entire BAU knows how bad a shot Spencer Reid is.

The job’s a gamble sometimes. Rolling the dice, and hoping that you don’t come up snake eyes. Asking for a hit on nineteen and hoping you don’t go bust. Holding off on taking that shot, and hoping that he doesn’t kill your colleague in the meantime.

An I.Q. of 187 can help with the type of gambling Reid had grown up around. Implementing the right strategies at the right time can ensure that you beat the house. Before he had even reached the legal gambling age, Spencer Reid had learnt the finer points of beating the house.

He had also learnt that that kind of gambling didn’t work in real life. You couldn’t count the cards of fate, or put it all on black. Sometimes, not even a high I.Q could get you through terrible situations.

He winces as the unsub slams his colleague’s head into the rocks. She doesn’t move, and he’s hoping like hell that she isn’t dead, that she’s just a dazed, and in a second or two, she’ll pull herself back up, and keep fighting.

She doesn’t pull herself up. Reid steps forward.

‘Put your hands in the air,’ he calls out. He can see the unsub visibly react to the sound of his voice, but it isn’t to step away from Prentiss’ unconscious form. He’s laughing.

Reid adjusts his aim, knowing that if the unsub makes a move that threatens Prentiss, he’ll have to take the shot, bad aim or not. He doesn’t make a move.

He’s just sitting there, laughing.

Reid takes a deep breath. He’s tried talking down killers before, but with varied success. For every Owen Savage, there has been a Benjamin Cyrus. Something tells him that he won’t be talking down this killer.

He moves slightly, and Reid’s finger squeezes a little bit tighter against the trigger before realizing that there is no way that he can make this shot. It’s at such an angle that he was sooner going to kill Prentiss than the unsub. He’s not about to take that chance.

‘She got lucky,’ the unsub says.__

Reid wonders if that means she is still alive. From where he stands, he can’t tell if she’s breathing or not. It could all be for nothing.

‘I wish I could say the same for you,’ he continues. There’s something in his hand – is it a gun? It’s not Prentiss’ gun, he knows that much; the Glock is lying off to the side, a knife beside it. The unsub ignores the weapons, which confuses Reid at first.

It takes less than a second to go down. A second in which the unsub starts to stand, and they both start to fire. Reid’s not too sure if his shot hit or not. He’s too busy staring at the tiny projectile that has entered his chest.

It’s not a bullet. It’s a tranquilizer dart. He can feel the drugs coursing through his veins. Burning them. He can’t tell if it’s an opioid or not. He can tell that he’s growing weaker by the second.

He played against the house and lost. Bet it all on black, and the ball had landed on zero.

His world fell into darkness.


	15. To Protect and Serve

Chapter Fourteen – To Protect and Serve (Morgan)

He finally stops running when he feels his phone starting to vibrate in his pocket. He doesn’t know how long he’s been running now; searching for a killer that might not even be there. A ghost, for all intents and purposes.

The name that flashes across his Caller I.D is Hotch’s, and he takes a few seconds to catch his breath before answering.

‘I lost him,’ he says, exasperated, before Hotch even has a chance to say anything. It isn’t the most accurate assessment. It would be better to say that they’d never even had him. That they’d reached the crime scene just moments after the unsub had fled, and they’d hadn’t been able to find him. Hotch doesn’t know any of this, of course, but th-

He pauses, mid thought. Why _is_ Hotch calling? JJ should be at the scene, waiting to brief the Unit Chief. Why is _he_ calling Morgan.

‘_He never left the scene, Morgan_,’ Hotch says, and in that moment Morgan knows that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. He can hear the complete despair in Hotch’s voice. A dejection that only ever accompanies the worst of events. ‘_He stabbed JJ._’

Morgan’s breath catches in his throat, and suddenly he’s running all over again. The combination of the rain and his own pounding heart makes it difficult to hear Hotch’s words, but he manages to just make them out. ‘_She lost a lot of blood, but the paramedics are working on her now._’

‘Did you get a hold of Prentiss and Reid?’ Morgan says, his words almost a yell against the ambient background noises.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, and Morgan isn’t quite sure whether Hotch has been distracted by something, or if he doesn’t want to answer the question.

‘_They aren’t answering their phones,_’ he reveals eventually, and Morgan’s mind immediately jumps to the worst possible outcomes. This hadn’t been luck. This had been a trap. The unsub had lured them here, specifically to toy with them.

He feels sick to his stomach. He should have seen this. He should have been able to protect them. Protecting his friends and family has always been the most important thing in his life, and now he’s failed.

*          *          *

By the time he makes it back to the crime scene, Hotch is the only member of the team there, looking slightly out of place amongst the uniformed members of the Boston PD. Already strapped into his Kevlar, he passes Morgan a vest.

‘Garcia went with JJ in the ambulance,’ he announces, and Morgan feels a pang of guilt. Not only because he had let JJ get attacked by their unsub, but because it had fallen on Garcia’s shoulders to help her through it. ‘Rossi’s on the search party.’

Search party.

They’re ominous words, as though they’re searching for a missing person, rather than a pair of agents who have gone out of contact. There’s a second ambulance still at the crime scene, as if driving home the fact that they might very well need another paramedic before the night is through.

Morgan takes the lead, hoping like hell that he is going in the right direction. He had seen them going this way, but there’s nothing to say that they didn’t suddenly change course.

It doesn’t take long to catch up to Rossi and the other members of the BPD. They haven’t found anything yet, in part due to the rain. It’s washing away any trace evidence that might tell them which path Reid and Prentiss took. That is, of course, assuming that they even stayed together.

‘We’ve got something!’ one of the officers calls from ahead of them, and Morgan’s heart skips a beat. What have they found? Their unsub? A body? Two bodies? When the result of their search becomes evident, he gives a slight sigh of relief. It’s Prentiss. One of the officers is helping her stand, and she looks a little worse for wear, but she’s alive.

‘Are you alright?’ he asks her, the moment he’s within hearing distance. She looks up, and even from the barely substantial torchlight, he can tell that her face is beginning to bruise.

‘Ask me tomorrow,’ she says with a grim smile, and it’s then that he notices her hand on the back of her head. She tries to brush him away, but he isn’t having any of it. Though the rain has washed away most of the blood, the wound hasn’t yet clotted.

‘We’re going to need another ambulance,’ says Rossi firmly, and even though he’s repressing it, Morgan can hear that despair in his voice as well.

‘No…You need...Reid.’ Her words come out slightly disjointed, as if she’s not so sure what she wants to be saying. ‘Wait...what’s going on? Where’s JJ?’

Morgan, Hotch and Rossi share a significant look. It’s not something they want to keep from her, but at the same time, it won’t do any of them any good if she goes into hysterics. At any other time, he would have had faith in her ability to compartmentalize, but right now, he’s not so sure.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Hotch asks, avoiding the subject altogether. They need to get what information they can; where Reid might have gone, where the unsub might have gone.

‘He attacked me. We fought. I heard Reid calling my name, and then…’ She puts a hand back up to her head, fingers coming away wet with blood.

‘I’ll take her back to the ambulance,’ says Rossi; it’s an implication that Hotch and Morgan are going to keep looking for Reid.

It’s not long before they find something significant. Reid’s badge and gun lying in a neat pile in the middle of the grass. Taunting them. He had led them here, not just to get rid of them.

‘He’s got Reid,’ says Hotch flatly, even though it’s a fact that’s already obvious to both of them.

Looking across at the Unit Chief, Morgan all of a sudden understands the weight upon his shoulders. Tonight he might well have lost two of his colleagues – his friends – and there’s nothing on this Earth that will stop him from feeling guilty about that.

He’ll worry about that later, though.

Right now, there are much more important things to think about.


	16. Mens Rea

Part Two: A Thunderstorm

_‘When you’re dead you’re dead.’ _

**Kurt Vonnegut**

_‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted,  
One need not be a house;  
The brain has corridors surpassing  
Material place.’_

**Emily Dickinson – One Need Not Be A Chamber to Be Haunted**

Chapter One – Mens Rea (Hotch)

Hotch’s face is stoic as he makes his way back to the primary crime scene. He’s already radioed the crime scene unit, but the chances that they’ll be able to find something that hasn’t been washed away by the rain are small. Deep down, though, Hotch knows that it isn’t forensic evidence that is going to solve this case. It’s the profile.

Their unsub isn’t just a copycat anymore. George Foyet would not have kidnapped Reid, and left JJ and Prentiss to die like that. Foyet prefers to spend time on his female victims. In a way, it’s good news. It means that they have an element that is unique to their unsub. Something he has that Foyet doesn’t.

It sure doesn’t feel like good news.

It’s been ten minutes since he had first arrived at the scene, somehow arriving just minutes before the first ambulance, minutes before Garcia decides to screw protocol and come help her friends. The image he had seen is one that will stick in his memory for a while. JJ lying there, so still. Though the rain has washed a lot of it away, there had still been an inordinate amount of it staining her shirt. Can a person survive after losing that much blood? Reid might have been able to answer that question, but Reid isn’t there right now.

It feels like failure. Two team members injured, one missing, and Hotch can’t help but feel that it’s all his fault. He’s the one in charge. He’s the one that should be protecting them. So why is it that they always seem to end up hurt?

Part of him knows that no matter how hard he tries, there’s always going to be a bullet he can’t stop. And it’s not just the physical hurt that’s the problem. They’ve all got enough mental scars to be case studies.

Rossi greets the two profilers with a grim look, raising his eyebrows in askance. The question – “Reid?” – doesn’t even need to be spoken aloud.

Hotch shakes his head.

His gaze is drawn to the back of the ambulance where Prentiss is sitting, a blanket around her shoulders. She, like Morgan, is soaking wet. A paramedic is attending to the wound at the back of her head.

‘It’s just a mild concussion,’ she tells him, her words belied by the darkening bruises on her face. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Go to the hospital,’ Hotch orders, and before he’s even finished talking, he knows that she’s going to argue.

‘You’re two agents down, Hotch. You need me.’ Rossi must have told her about JJ, and she need only look at their faces to know Reid’s fate. In a way, she’s right, though he doesn’t want to admit it. After all, he’s the one that went back to work after getting in the way of an exploding SUV.

She doesn’t bring up New York, though – a fact for which he’s grateful. It’s another one of those events in his life that serves only to accentuate the people that he’s lost. Elle. Gideon. Haley. Kate. They might not all be dead, but he’s lost them nonetheless.

‘Go to the hospital,’ he repeats. He’s not going to be responsible for losing someone else. ‘We have the BPD to help us. We’ll find him.’ He’s talking about the unsub as much as he’s talking about Reid.

There’s anger in her eyes – anger at Hotch, at the man who did this – but there’s also fear. Fear that not all of them are going to make it through this case. It’s a fear that Hotch can understand.

‘At least stay the night,’ he says. ‘If your doctor gives you the okay, then you can discharge.’

She nods numbly, before her eyes suddenly widen. ‘I saw him,’ she whispers, as though it’s something she’s only just remembered. ‘I saw his face.’

‘You saw the unsub’s face?’ asks Rossi, his voice taking on a tone of sudden urgency.

‘Yeah, I…he was wearing a mask – like the Reaper. I ripped it off, and then he overpowered me.’ She starts moving her hand towards the back of her head once again, but then stops.

‘Do you think you could do a composite?’

When she gives a vague affirmation, Hotch feels the tiniest bit of hope surging through. Hope that maybe the team will make it through this one alive.

But that doesn’t make him feel any less guilty.


	17. Enter Night

Chapter Two – Enter Night (Prentiss)

Rossi accompanies her to the hospital – partially to make sure she gets there in one piece, partially to get the latest on JJ’s condition, and partially to get Garcia so that they can head back to the police station. Three agents down is bad enough. Hotch had given Will a call, the former detective having pledged his presence at the hospital before the night is through. If all goes well, Prentiss is hoping that she should be out of there by then, but of course, things never really seem to go well.

Rossi bids her farewell as she’s checked over by a doctor whose name she hadn’t quite caught.  Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as he makes his way down the hall, no doubt to find Garcia and divulge the boundaries of their monumental screw up. They’d had the unsub within their grasp, and now JJ’s fighting for her life, and Reid could be dead for all she knows. She isn’t feeling too crash-hot herself.

She’s taken down to Radiology for an MRI, and she’s vaguely reminded of the other head injuries she’s had the pleasure of experiencing. A relatively unsupervised adolescence in a multitude of different countries had led to a number of different hospital experiences, at least two of which involved minor concussions, one that had gotten her grounded for several months, and one which her mother _still_ isn’t privy to the full story of. Milwaukee and Colorado had both earned her MRIs, and a healthy dose of sick leave as well, and she’s desperately hoping that that isn’t going to be the case tonight. She still has the image of the unsub fresh in her mind, all her thoughts concentrating on not letting it escape. It could be a vital piece to the puzzle.

They want to keep her overnight for observation, which doesn’t really surprise her, but she’s annoyed by it nonetheless. The team needs her. The team needs everyone. They’re more than just the sum of their individual parts.

Garcia and Rossi had evidently waited around for confirmation that she isn’t about to drop dead, a fact for which she’s kind of grateful, but at the same time, she’d prefer that they had double-timed it back to the police station to look for the son of a bitch that has taken Reid. Garcia’s eyes are edged with red, and she’s definitely not the happy-go-lucky technical analyst that Prentiss is so used to seeing. JJ’s still in surgery, she learns, and it’s touch and go. The knife hadn’t pierced any major organs, but she had lost a lot of blood.

‘We need to go,’ says Rossi after what feels like an age, but in reality, it’s only been five or so minutes. Her mind is playing tricks on her tonight, but she’s still grasping onto that face. The sketch artists Hotch had sent around arrive not long after Rossi and Garcia leave, and by that point, it’s well into the early hours of the morning.

She describes to them the face as best as she can – she still has that image in her mind, but it’s an image that had been marred by the wind and the rain, and she’s hoping like that hell that the sketch has even a passing resemblance to the man that they’re chasing.

The sketch artists leave, and it’s as though a great weight has been lifted, and yet her body feels so much heavier. The weight of the day’s events is finally allowing itself to crush her. Her mind wants nothing more than to check out of hospital and to get back to work, but the rest of her is perfectly happy to lay back and embrace the darkness of sleep.


	18. Deliberations of Life and Death

Chapter Three – Deliberations of Life and Death (Reid)

Sometimes, Spencer Reid wonders. He wonders if there’s a newsletter that all the serial killers get – one that says “hey, look, if you ever run into trouble with the BAU, go for the skinny guy. His aim isn’t very good, and he loses consciousness easily.” He thinks about the times he’s been kidnapped. The times he’s been held hostage. The times he’s been beaten up. The times he’s been shot at. The times he’s almost been blown up. And he wonders.

Is it worth it?

He’s sitting here, tied to a chair right now, wondering whether all that hardship is worth the lives that they’ve saved. And he doesn’t need to think twice. He’s willing to paint a bright red target on the back of his woolen vest, if it means they save the victim. He knows all of the team are willing to make that sacrifice. Except now, he’s fairly sure _he_ is supposed to be the next victim, which puts him into a paradox.

It’s different to the first time – it’s always a little bit different. The unsub’s focus is solely on him. It’s not Philip Dowd, trying to prove he can be a hero. It’s not Ted Bryer, convinced that the government is watching him. It’s not Tobias Henkel (or even Raphael or Charles Henkel), asking him who to kill and who to save. It’s not Benjamin Cyrus, trying to do God’s will. It’s just a man who takes perverse pleasure in the pain of others.

Right now, he’s specifically taking pleasure in the pain of Supervisory Special Agent Doctor Spencer Reid, Ph. D. BSc Psych, BA Soc.

It’s a little bit different, and yet it’s the same. He uses the same coping mechanisms. He thinks about his mother, sometimes his father even. He thinks about his friends (and about the friends that he’s lost). He thinks about what they’ll do – how they’ll cope – if he doesn’t make it out of here alive. And that makes him hold on a little bit longer.

He’s not afraid of death.

He’s been through so much in life, that its end will just be another one of those things that happens. That doesn’t mean that he would willingly choose to die. Under duress, maybe, but not as a free and active choice. He would much prefer to live a little longer, but if it comes down to it, he’s not afraid.

If anything, he’s a little curious.

For all the intelligence he has, there is ultimately, so much more of the unknown. He can tell you with certainty the average number of sesame seeds on a hamburger bun, but he can’t tell you the boundaries of time and space, the meaning of existence. Can’t tell you what lies beyond death. Not yet, anyway. He’s been dragged away from that white light once before already.

He feels the sharp sting of pain as a fist connects with his face. He can see the unsub in his truest form now. Anything before today had just been theatrics. Had just been their unsub mimicking the Reaper to gain their attention. His mind is working double-time to process this new information and generate a profile.

Male, obviously. Between the ages of thirty and forty. Feels unappreciated. Those are things that had been in the original profile, and they’re not wrong. He’s looking for the other details. Details like “enjoys watching his victims suffer.” Reid vaguely wonders how difficult it must have been for this man to kill without really savoring the moment.

‘The Reaper,’ the unsub goads. ‘I’ve killed twice as many people as him. Junkies. Whores. I should be the one on the front page of the paper, not him.’

And that’s it. This man had killed high-risk victims. It’s not that no-one ever noticed that people had been disappearing. The ugly truth is most likely that no-body cared.

Reid looks at the face of his assailant; dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, a nose that’s maybe a little longer than average. Nothing too striking.

‘After this…I’ll be bigger than the Reaper. He outsmarted the FBI. But he didn’t kill any of them.’ Then, he gives a wide smile, and all of a sudden Reid realizes that this could really be the end for him.


	19. Bring Him Home

Chapter Five – Bring Him Home (Garcia)

They’re adjusting the profile, based on the new information gleaned from the previous night’s events. Garcia sits at her laptop, watching as what remains of the team puts the pieces together.

‘Even though he had the opportunity to take either Prentiss or JJ, he took Reid,’ says Rossi, marker bouncing in his hand. ‘That gives us clues to his preferred victimology, rather than the victimology he adopted in his guise as a Reaper copy-cat.’

Hotch rubs a hand across his brow, clearly tired, but unwilling to admit it. They’ve been running on full steam for too long. The adrenaline is wearing off. Garcia feels torn; she knows that the team will burn out soon, yet she knows that Reid needs them.

After this case, they’ll all need some serious hugging.

‘And from Emily’s description, we have a white male, early to mid-forties, well-built. Someone who thinks that his killings deserve more attention than they’d actually gotten. Garcia, can you look for any unsolved murders in the past five years, where the victims are young white males?’

‘Not just in Boston?’

Hotch shakes his head. ‘No, the killer relocated so that we would make the Reaper connection. His prior murders could be anywhere.’

Grimacing slightly, Garcia starts typing in the search perimeters at lightning speed. She needs to be strong for the team – they can’t do this without her – but part of her is intent on having a nervous breakdown. She’s a tech, not a field agent. She doesn’t think she’s cut out for this.

Morgan, it seems, senses her anxiety, and he puts a hand on her shoulder. He’s not particularly calm himself – there’s a fear in his eyes that she’s only seen a few times before.

‘Hey,’ he says softly, smiling. ‘It’s all gonna be okay, baby girl.’ She’s not sure if he believes his own words, and she’s not sure if she believes them either, but she appreciates the comfort. There are days when she hates this job – the days when she doesn’t even know if her friends are going to make it home alive.

‘Um…’ she says, after a couple of minutes. ‘In the last five years, there are several hundred unsolved murders with young, white males as victims.’

‘Any cases with two or more deaths?’

She taps a few more keys. ‘That narrows it down to…four cases.’

‘In how many were the victims kidnapped first?’

‘…None,’ she says, with some disappointment. Another dead end. The team is a well-oiled machine, and half its parts are missing. Usually, they can work to compensate, but with three agents out of commission, it’s proving difficult.

They continue to run different scenarios until the sun rises, the post-rain glow making it a truly beautiful sight – a sight they’re far too busy to pay any attention to. It’s almost seven a.m when Hotch gets the phone call. He excuses himself from the room, leaving Garcia somewhat apprehensive. Morgan and Rossi are sharing significant glances, ones that she doesn’t have the skill to properly interpret.

She doesn’t have to though – he returns less than five minutes later, a look on his face that’s approaching relief. ‘JJ’s out of surgery,’ he says. ‘Her doctor says she should be fine.’

She gives a short, shaking laugh. It’s good news, but they’re not out of the woods yet.

‘Prentiss has been discharged,’ Hotch adds. ‘One of the Detectives is going to pick her up from the hospital.’

Their brief celebrations are interrupted by a sound from the laptop. An email. Garcia can’t help but feel that she knows what’s coming. A narcissist. Someone who wants to show off. Morgan, Hotch and Rossi figure it out pretty quickly, too, and they crowd in a small semi-circle around the tiny screen.

Her fingers are at the keyboard, ready to trace if she needs to. The video starts on a black screen, slowly coming into focus – focus on a man bound to a chair.

Reid.

Considering the unsub has had him for several hours, he seems surprisingly alert. His hair is a little mussed up, and there are a few bruises on his face, but there are no life threatening injuries as far as she can see. But that’s an analytical approach, and she’s an emotional person, so she feels herself letting out a slight whimper anyway.

‘Garcia…’ says Morgan. It’s all he says, but then, it’s all he needs to say.

‘I’m trying.’ If Reid was here, he’d say, “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” But Star Wars quotes are for another time.

They need to get Reid back.


	20. The Message

Chapter Six – The Message (Morgan)

His heart drops the moment the video comes up on screen. They’re not fully sure about the true motivations of this unsub, and he’s not entirely convinced that he’s not about to see one of his best friends murdered right now.

On-screen, Reid shuffles slightly against the bonds the keep him tied to the chair. It’s been running almost thirty seconds now, but it feels like so, so much longer. They’re all silent, the only sound being Garcia’s fingers against the keyboard as she tries desperately to work out where the video is streaming from, if it’s even streaming at all. He’s a little bit glad that her attention’s not focused on the video itself – he can tell that things are about to get a whole lot worse.

A second person walks into the field of view – he’s wearing all black, and he’s masked. They can’t really make out anything that will add to the profile off hand. As soon as this is done, they’ll need to go over the video frame by frame. If they’re not busy vomiting, of course.

‘The illustrious BAU…’

Morgan feels his grip tightening against the back of Garcia’s chair. The tech herself is attempting to ignore the video, but it’s evident that she really, really can’t. None of them can. It’s permeating every facet of their being.

This unsub can’t actually see them, but it doesn’t matter. The scene still feels like a violation in the most perverse sense. He’s trying to make them second-guess themselves, trying to rattle them.

And it’s working.

They had come into this expecting Foyet, and instead, they’d found someone just as bad, if not worse. At least with Foyet they know who he is, what to expect. Right now, for this case, they’re flying blind.

It’s not unusual – they wouldn’t be doing their jobs very well if the same unsubs kept coming back – but today, it’s almost terrifying, because there’s so much on the line. For all they know, Reid is about to be killed right in front of them, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do to stop it.

The unsub has a knife in his hands – not an ornamental knife. The kind of knife you use when you actually want to cut something. He runs the blade across the back of Reid’s chair, before bringing it around to rest against the profiler’s collarbone. Reid, to his credit, doesn’t move. Doesn’t even blink. Morgan keeps his eyes locked on Reid’s, rather than on the knife. The last time Reid had been in this position, he’d sent them a message, and that’s what Morgan’s looking out for right now.

It doesn’t stop him from shivering when the knife moves upwards, the blunt edge trailing across Reid’s chin. It seems almost…sexual. Dominating.

Then, the moment’s past, and the knife is moving downwards, towards the hands that are tied to the armrests. It lingers at the crook of the elbow.

‘Nothing but a junkie,’ the unsub says, and Morgan’s not entirely sure if he’s speaking for the camera, or just to Reid. Day in and day out, they all pretend not to notice the scars that are the result of his last tryst with a serial killer.

‘A junkie and a whore,’ Reid says, only it’s not his voice. It’s a softer, trembling voice. Once upon a time, Morgan would have expected this from Reid, but he’s long since come to realize that despite all appearances, Spencer Reid has nerves of steel.

This is the message that he’s looking for.

‘What did you say?’ the unsub asks, and it’s evident that this is Reid’s show now.

‘You know it’s true,’ Reid says. ‘That’s why you took me, out of everyone. You know I need to be punished.’

Morgan’s teeth grit, and he’s sure that he’s going to break something if he clenches his fist any tighter. When they get Reid out alive – and he really doesn’t want to think about any other possibility – he’s going to chastise the younger man for doing something so stupid. Because while he’s giving them what they need to find the unsub, he’s also damn near pulling the trigger on his own fate.

‘I think you’ll be punished regardless,’ the unsub says, and his voice is low and threatening. He casts his glance upwards, as if he’s only just remembering that the camera is still on.

_No, no, no_, Morgan’s saying inside his head. _Don’t turn it off_. He does though, and they’re left with the taunting of a blank screen.

It’s worse, in a way – not seeing. They have no way of knowing just what the unsub is doing to Reid. How he’s being…punished. Still. He doesn’t think he’d be much happier if they had been subjected to the sight of Reid’s torture.

‘Alright,’ Hotch says. ‘Junkies and whores – that’s who our unsub likes to prey on.’ Even the ever stoic Hotch has trouble hiding the look of sheer pain on his face. Morgan knows that Hotch, more than anyone, will take Reid’s fate to heart. It will be a weight on his shoulders. An unflinching Atlas.

‘He seems almost obsessional,’ Morgan adds. ‘Foyet’s M.O. worked for him because the stabbings had undertones of sexual dominance – the act of penetration. I…’ he falters. ‘I think we should be looking for cases with some level of sexual assault to them.’

Garcia lets out a small gasp, and Morgan finds himself putting a hand on her shoulder. It’s not easy for any of them.

‘Alright,’ says Hotch. ‘Let’s get to work.’


	21. Bittersweet Symphony

Chapter Six – Bittersweet Symphony (JJ)

JJ wakes up, her throat dry and her whole body aching. Her mind is a dark fuzz – she’s not quite sure what had happened to put her in this position, but judging by the stab of pain in her torso as she tries to sit up, it’s nothing good.

‘Lay down, chere,’ she hears, and frowns. It’s Will’s voice, but he hadn’t been here, in Boston, had he? ‘I’ll call for a doctor.’ She manages to open her eyes, and the world is a little blurry at first, but she blinks a few times, and her vision clears.

Hospital room.

Which explains the abdominal pain, as well as Will’s presence.

A memory flashes through her mind.

Staunching the flow of blood in the rain. A knife. She feels the stab all over again, and lets out a gasp.

‘It’s okay, Jayj.’ Will’s voice again. ‘You’re alright. Are you thirsty?’ She barely has the presence of mind to nod, and feels a little bit better when she feels the first of the ice chips starting to melt in her mouth. Not quite an oasis in the desert, but she’ll take what she’s given.

‘My name is Doctor Cahill. Can you tell me yours?’ It’s only at the sound of the second voice that she realizes someone else is in the room – a white-coated someone.

‘Jennifer Jareau,’ she tells him, her voice scratchy. Despite the ice chips, her throat still feels dry.

‘Do you remember what happened?’ Cahill asks, his brow furrowed.

‘Yeah,’ she breathes, and even the act of talking is painful.

‘You’re very lucky,’ the doctor says. ‘You lost some blood, but you’ll be fine with a little bed rest.’

‘I guess that means I’ll be waiting on you hand and foot for a few weeks,’ Will says, a grim smile on his face.

‘The team?’ JJ asks, because it’s really the only thing she can think about; the team and the case.

Will’s expression falters. ‘I don’t have all the details,’ he tells her. ‘But I know that Agent Prentiss was in with a concussion.’

‘Agent Prentiss was just discharged,’ the doctor reveals.

JJ chokes on her words, trying to get them out. ‘Can I see her?’

‘You really should be-’ the doctor starts, but JJ cuts him off.

‘Please – I need to know.’

She’s tired and her body aches, and she’s worried – if Emily has a concussion, then what fates might have befallen the rest of the team?

‘I’ll see if she’s left yet.’

The next few minutes pass painfully slowly, and JJ’s heart thumps an aching beat against her chest. She almost cries in relief when the doctor returns and Emily walks in after him.

‘JJ…How are you feeling?’ The other woman looks tired, her eyes sunken and filled with concern, bruises dark against her usually pale skin.

‘…Been better,’ JJ breathes. ‘What happened?’

The look in Emily’s eyes tells her everything she needs to know; it’s definitely not good news.

‘He, um…’ She bits her lip. ‘He took Reid. And beat the crap out of me,’ she adds as a side-note.

Any words JJ might have had are lost in Emily’s revelation. _He has Reid. A narcissistic, sociopathic serial killer has Reid. Again._

‘The team have been working the case all night,’ Emily continues, and it doesn’t feel right for her to be saying the team, because the word “team” implies that they’re all there, instead of just four of them. ‘I need to get back to them.’ Her voice has taken on an apologetic tone, and JJ knows that she has to leave.

‘Go,’ JJ tells her. ‘Find him. We can’t…’ Her words are mingled with a choked sob, and JJ realizes that she’s crying, her cheeks wet with salty tears.

‘We will do whatever it takes,’ Emily promises her. ‘You get some rest.’ Her voice has that same concerned tone as Will’s, and JJ is already getting sick of hearing it. She needs to be out of this bed, right now, but judging from the IV stuck in her wrist, and the half dozen machines hooked up to her body, that isn’t going to be happening any time soon.

‘Call me,’ she says forcefully, as Emily walks out. ‘If anything happens, call me.’

‘We will,’ Emily says with a strained smile, and JJ’s not really sure that she believes the other woman’s words.

She doesn’t need to be a profiler to know what her family is thinking.


	22. The Breakdown

Chapter Seven – The Breakdown (Rossi)

David Rossi has worked a lot of difficult cases, most of them difficult for different reasons. Sometimes they’re difficult because the unsub is hard to catch, or because the victimology hits close to home, or sometimes because it’s two a.m on a Friday morning, and it’s they’re third case back to back, and they’re not any closer to being able to go home and just _sleep_ for the next thousand years.

This particular case is some combination of all those hardships, with a few extra thrown in for good measure. They’re persevering, though. That’s what they do. That’s all they ever seem to do. Holding on until the inevitable Breakdown. The Breakdown that had claimed half a dozen agents back in the BAU’s early years. The Breakdown that had claimed Gideon, claimed Greenaway. Rossi hadn’t been here for those, but he’s heard the stories. He thinks that after this case, they’ll all be that much closer to falling apart.

The laptop has been closed now; even with the video link no longer up and running, none of them can bear to look, as though it will suddenly show them all of their deepest, darkest nightmares. Right now, there’s no technology, no forensics, no fancy shmancy futuristic technology. It’s back to basics. Back to the profile.

They’re refining said profile, based on the information they’d obtained during the communication with the unsub – the information that Reid may well have sacrificed his life to get to them.

White male, between the ages of thirty and forty. Those aren’t the characteristics they need to worry about, though – they’ve got the sketch Emily had given. What they need to worry about is his past, his fetishes, his paraphilias, his wants, his needs.

There’s a knock on the door, and Emily steps into the room. Her skin is pale, except where it’s not, and her eyes are dark and hollow. Right now, though, they all look like crap.

‘Hey,’ she greets them. ‘JJ’s awake and talking. She couldn’t give us anything we don’t already have.’

She slumps in the nearest available chair, dejected posture reflecting how they all feel.

‘The unsub made contact,’ Hotch tells her, lips tight. ‘Reid managed to get a message through.’

‘He’s good at that,’ Morgan adds with a mirthless laugh.

‘So what are we looking for then?’

‘Someone who preyed on high-risk victims,’ Morgan says. ‘Drug addicts, street workers.’

‘That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,’ Emily frowns. ‘A lot of unsubs go for high-risk victims.’

‘High-risk _male_ victims,’ adds Rossi, which does narrow it down a little bit. ‘He took Reid, when he just as easily could have taken Emily or JJ.’

‘He didn’t rape his female victims,’ Morgan muses. ‘But that could have just been the gender thing – couldn’t get it up, so he stabbed them instead. We shouldn’t just be looking for crimes with _sexual _elements – we should be looking for crimes with homosexual elements.’

‘It makes sense,’ Rossi finds himself agreeing. ‘The way he was letting the knife touch Reid – it was almost…caressing.’

It almost feels as though they’re repeating the same information over and over again, in the guise of progress. Garcia opens the laptop again, FBI databases at her fingertips.

‘Alrighty, give me some search parameters, my fellow geniuses…Or would that be genii?’ The question hangs in the air, and David Rossi knows for a fact that if Spencer Reid were here, then it would have been answered in a heartbeat. He’s not though, and maybe that’s what they’re all thinking about. ‘I think it’s just geniuses,’ Garcia says eventually, as she taps through what Rossi assumes are the age, race and gender parameters.

‘Okay, we’re probably looking for someone who’s been arrested for soliciting a male prostitute, maybe assaulting them – if he saw his victims as a representation of someone in his life, then he wouldn’t react to rejection very well,’ Morgan tells her.

‘He doesn’t,’ Emily agrees. ‘Look at the way he got our attention – by mimicking someone he knew would be noticed. People have probably dismissed him for most of his life – he’s probably unemployed, or in a menial position.’ She gives a quick glance to Garcia, giving an apologetic look. ‘It probably means he’s going to make an example of Reid to ensure that people don’t dismiss him this time.’

Rossi gives his head a slight shake. Whichever way they look at this, it really is bad news for Reid. Even if they manage to narrow the profile down, they might not be able to work out the location in time. Of course, the profile tells them that the unsub wants to draw this out, which is little comfort. Whichever way they look at this, it’s going to be difficult.

Whichever way they look at this, someone is going to breakdown.


	23. Don't Fear the Reaper

Chapter Nine – Don’t Fear the Reaper (Reid)

Spencer Reid is a blinker.

That’s what he tells himself, most days.

Today, though…Today he keeps his eyes open, holding the unsub’s gaze as the knife trails across his torso. It presses in sometimes, scoring the skin, but not cutting deep enough to draw blood.

It cuts through his shirt buttons – just the first two – and he’s hyperaware of the draft against his skin. There’s a door open somewhere in the building – is it a house? A warehouse? He can’t really tell, from the limited amount that he’s actually seen. He needs to find out what he can for the next time the unsub calls the team to gloat.

If he calls them

It makes sense that he would – he’s after recognition, after all – but at the same time, this feels like a much more private moment, as though this isn’t something he wants the team to see.

He’s ashamed, then. Ashamed of who he is.

Spencer Reid has felt a lot of things during his childhood, but shame isn’t one of them. Tied to a goalpost naked, he hadn’t felt ashamed for who he was. He’d been embarrassed, scared, maybe even a little angry, but if there was one thing his mother had taught him it was that he should never be ashamed of who he is.

There’s some irony in that, considering that some days, his mother doesn’t even know who _she _is, let alone him.

Still, he’s never told her about what had happened in the wake of his kidnapping by Tobias Hankel – he’s never even told her about that kidnapping. That part of his life remains one thing that he does feel some amount of shame about, even if it has played a major part in making him who he is today.

If nothing else, he feels regret. For shutting out the team – the team that had rescued him then, and who are no doubt doing absolutely every single thing in their power to rescue him now.

That’s the thought he hold onto as the knife pierces the skin. He looks down and sees the blood welling in the thin cut. It’s not deep, by any means, but the unsub has barely started. Reid is hyperaware of the fact that this is the first time he will truly have been able to fulfill his fantasies – everything so far has just been practice. His preferred victim type had not been the young women the Reaper had victimized.

The unsub leans in, and Reid tries not to flinch as he feels the hot breath against his neck.

‘You’re so beautiful – has anyone ever told you that?’ he whispers, his voice low.

Reid doesn’t say anything, doesn’t react.

His mother calls him beautiful, sometimes.

_My little angel,_ she says, and then they read Chaucer together. The first time, before he’d memorized _The Canterbury Tales_, he’d read ahead, finished the page before his mother had even finished recounting the second sentence, but after that, he’d learned to just close his eyes and listen to the sound of his mother’s voice.

The words hadn’t been the important part.

The important part had been knowing that his mother was well enough to sit with him, and read with him, and remember his name. She still forgets sometimes, but he likes to pretend that she hasn’t.

He’s torn from his reverie as the knife pierces his flesh again, and he’s almost grateful that it’s just been the knife so far. He knows the profile, and he has been through a lot of different kinds of torment, but not that kind.

The knife cuts through the rest of his buttons, and the unsub seems a little bit frustrated by the fact that Reid’s bound hands prevent him from removing it entirely. He pushes it back instead, baring Reid’s pale, hairless chest, and the couple of bloody wounds that already mark it.

He suppresses the shiver.

He doesn’t blink.

He’s not afraid of death, but that doesn’t mean he will welcome it with open arms.

The knife makes another cut, but Spencer Reid isn’t paying attention to that. He’s trying to retreat inside his mind. To focus on the mental, not the physical. He counts the number of stars that are dancing around his vision. He counts the number of seconds between footsteps.

Wait.

That’s not right.

Why are there footsteps? There aren’t supposed to be footsteps. The unsub is standing in one spot, slicing that knife deeper and deeper into the skin. He’s concentrating so hard, he doesn’t hear what Spencer does. Doesn’t see what Spencer does.

The unsub gives a soft moan as the knife pierces his own chest. He staggers backwards, blood spreading across his shirt like ripples in a pond. Reid watches his eyes – they’re wide, fearful.

He falls to the ground, clutching at the knife that’s already gone.

‘You’ve got to admit, he didn’t see that coming,’ Reid’s savior says, only…it’s not his savior.

He looks wilder than the one and only time Reid had seen him. Hair greyer, eyes more sunken. Like this, Reid can see the depths of depravity that George Foyet is capable of.

‘What about you, Spencer Reid?’ The Reaper smiles. ‘Did _you_ see this coming?’

Spencer Reid blinks.


	24. Bullet With Butterfly Wings

Chapter Nine – Bullet With Butterfly Wings (Morgan)

The silence has been persisting for several long, agonizing minutes as they trawl through files. As fantastic as Penelope Garcia’s technical skills are, they can only find the data that’s actually in the system. The problem remains that the victim types they’re looking for try their best to stay _out_ of the system.

A few moments later there’s a knock on the door, breaking through the tension that they’d all noticed building up. One of the local officers is standing there, an expression of unfettered nerves on his face.

‘There’s a…we got a call – from a man claiming to be your unsub,’ he tells them.

‘That could just be a hoax,’ Rossi points out. ‘He has a video link – why would he change his M.O. like this?’

‘He has been pretty inconsistent,’ Emily rationalizes in response. Her eyes are closed, fingers massaging a tattoo into her forehead. ‘Copying Foyet’s method, luring us to the park. Maybe he wants to confuse us.’

‘Um…’ the officer says. ‘He says he has Special Agent Reid – and that “his sins will be the death of him.”’

That seals it, Morgan knows. There’s no way any man off the street could know about Reid’s past, unless they were specifically looking to attack the BAU. The question still remains, why has their unsub reverted to using the phone.

‘Garcia,’ Hotch says warningly, as he moves to pick up the call. The tech is already typing like a woodpecker on speed.

‘He’s taken precautions,’ Garcia notes, eyes not leaving the screen. ‘I think I can break them.’

‘This is Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner,’ Hotch says, as the call goes onto speakerphone. There’s an unwritten agreement that Hotch is the only one that’s going to be speaking – a display of authority.

‘_Your agent will be dead if you don’t act fast._’ The voice is synthesized – mechanical. He’s using a voice distorter. Morgan’s hand slips into his pocket, twisting the bullet back and forth. This is wrong. This is all wrong.

Why is he using a voice distorter? They’ve already heard his voice. The profile tells them that he wants to be recognized. Now that he has Reid, there is absolutely no reason for him to be suddenly hiding his identity.

But, they’ve been wrong before – and sometimes it has ended very, very badly. Today it’s Reid’s life on the line and they absolutely cannot screw it up.

‘_I want my name in the papers – I want everyone to know what it is that I’ve done._’

‘And what is that name?’ Hotch asks cautiously, giving Emily a slight nod. Garcia’s busy working on the trace, but they’ve got more than one laptop in the room. Really, after Garcia, Reid’s the best choice for technical stuff, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. Rossi has to give Garcia a call every time his phone stops working, and Morgan’s more experienced with hardware.

‘_Richard Carson. Put that name out into the world, and I will let Supervisory Special Agent Reid live._’

‘I’ve got him,’ Garcia mouths, just as the phone clicks off. ‘I have a location.’

They all stand as one, Emily reading from the laptop. ‘Richard Carson, thirty-three, arrested for several counts of assault, soliciting a prostitute...’ The list goes on, but the “who” isn’t important now – not as much as the “where” is. Giving Garcia an apologetic look, Morgan follows the rest of the team out to the SUVs.

‘This isn’t right.’ Rossi shakes his head, voicing the words that Morgan knows they’re all thinking. ‘This could be an ambush.’

‘I’ll call S.W.A.T.’ Hotch nods in agreement.

No-one voices the possibility that Reid could very well be dead already, and considering what they _do_ know about Richard Carson, it’s a very likely possibility. Morgan tries to keep his mind away from that thought, and tries to think about something else instead.

He goes through the tactical strategies that would be best suited to the location that they’re hitting. No matter how much he tries to distract himself, though, his mind keeps coming back to Reid.

Sometimes you just can’t protect the people you love, no matter how hard you try.

Sometimes, the bad guys win.


	25. Back Into Your System

Chapter Ten – Back Into Your System (Prentiss)

Her heart pumps through her chest, beats coming so fast that it’s almost as though there are two hearts, fighting for dominance. It’s just the kind of pop culture reference that Reid_ would_ have gotten, and she manages to crack a half smile at the thought.

It doesn’t last long though – the Kevlar that she’s strapping on, and the gun at her hip and the dead, dead silence that hangs over them are just more reminders about how badly this could end.

Rain falls gently from the sky; light, drifting drops that give off an air of tranquility. Even mother nature lies sometimes. Everybody lies.

Emily Prentiss had grown up in an environment that was wrought with untruths and half-truths and quasi-truths. She’d long since learnt not to take honesty for granted, but at the same time, it’s something she respects in a person.

She’d never had the chance to believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, and it’s that lack of innocence that had made hope a pretty tricky concept to believe in. It’s taken Emily this long to see the best in people, rather than the worst. That’s not just about her childhood – that’s about people disregarding her skills, and assuming that because of who she is, she’d be willing to lie, to cheat, to spy her way to the top.

If nothing else, being part of this team has shown her the true meaning of loyalty. And that’s why it’s going to hurt so much if they’re torn apart like this.

This part of the city is sparsely populated. _Harder to hear the screams_, her mind tells her. When all of this is over, she’s going to buy a chocolate fudge sundae, and she is damn well going to enjoy it.

S.W.A.T. moves in first, half of them through the front entrance with Morgan and Rossi, and the rest through the back. Any windows are fairly high up, so that means that this will go down one of two ways.

The two possibilities for any raid; either the unsub goes down quietly, or he goes down shooting. Going by the profile, this unsub will take the second option, and it isn’t comforting in the very least, even if the profile has recently been thrown into turmoil.

The first few rooms are cleared, and Emily has that feeling of foreboding at the back of her mind. The place feels empty, the same way that her condo does after she hasn’t been home in three weeks, and the echoing sound of her footsteps make her feel ridiculously lonely.

There is something ridiculously wrong here.

Really, ridiculously wrong.

Hotch sees it first, and he freezes to a halt beside her. She follows his gaze to the far wall, though it’s so big it’s a wonder that it’s not the first thing that she’d noticed. At least ten feet high, and drawn entirely in blood.

The eye of providence.

Her stomach roils. There are over five quarts of blood in the human body, according to Reid. She doesn’t know how many it would take to do this, but it’s fresh blood, and she doesn’t even want to think about what that means for Reid.

‘We profiled that he would stop trying to emulate the Reaper,’ Emily says, her voice soft. If she speaks any louder, then Hotch will be able to hear the tremble.

‘We did,’ Hotch confirms, and just as Emily keeps her words soft, Hotch keeps his short, though she has never heard so much as a tremble in his voice in the entire time that she’s known him.

‘We’ve got a body!’ one of the S.W.A.T. guys calls out from the next room, and everything comes crashing down.


	26. The Price We Pay

Chapter Eleven – The Price We Pay (Hotch)

A long time ago, Aaron Hotchner had learned to hide his fear. He had learned that tears, and screams, and terrified expressions only fueled his father’s anger, made him more likely to hit again, hit harder.

After a while, he’d stopped crying himself to sleep.

There are some days now, when even he can’t keep it all locked up inside. The anger, the fear, the frustration – it all comes pouring out. In the words “we’ve got a body” he hears “you’ve failed Reid – failed the team. You couldn’t protect them when it mattered most.”

He looks at the eye of providence. The all-seeing eye. Even if Foyet isn’t here, his legacy lives on.

Emily gives him a look, and in a split second, they’re moving in the direction of the voices. It takes Hotch several seconds to realize that the body in question is not that of Spencer Reid.

_Who is it then?_

It’s Emily that provides the answer. ‘It’s the freaking unsub.’ Her eyes are wide, her mouth open in surprise.

‘Are you sure?’ Hotch asks, even though he already knows what her response is going to be.

‘Of course I’m sure. I don’t exactly forget the faces of people who beat the crap out of me.’ There’s a short pause before she adds, ‘It matches the mugshot in his file as well.’ They both stare down at his pale, lifeless corpse. ‘Then who killed him?’

Hotch already knows that answer, too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.

The eye of providence.

The stab wounds.

The profile.

George Foyet does not like to share glory.

‘The Reaper,’ he says firmly. ‘The Reaper killed him.’

If it’s even possible, she looks even more surprised at his declaration. This is worse than any other outcome that they had planned for. ‘He didn’t like that Carson was using his image. So he killed him.’

‘That’s what it looks like,’ confirms Hotch, though in addition to that, there’s also the possibility – the _probability_, even – that Foyet is doing this to mess with them.

Morgan’s voice crackles over the radio. ‘_We’ve got Reid. He’s alive._’

Hotch feels a swell of relief. Alive is good. Alive and unharmed would have been better, but alive is good, considering the circumstances.

‘Carson’s dead,’ he replies. ‘The Reaper killed him.’

‘_We know_,’ Morgan confirms. ‘_Reid told us. Hotch…there’s something else you need to see._’

Upon confirming that Emily has control of the situation here, Hotch goes in search of the rest of his team.

They’re  in an upstairs area of the warehouse, and Reid is being checked over by two of the paramedics that had followed them to the scene. He’s shirtless, and covered in blood – the major source of which is the eye of providence that’s been carved into his chest.

A permanent reminder.

‘Hotch…’ His voice is weak, but there’s an undercurrent of strength that remind Hotch of just what a formidable force his team are. ‘Foyet, he…’

One of the paramedics tries to stop him from moving the oxygen mask out of the way as they move him onto the stretcher, but Reid is having no truck with it. ‘He kidnapped…girls – wants you to go looking…’ His eyes roll backwards as he loses consciousness, and the paramedic gives Hotch a look that’s almost reprimanding.

‘He’s lost a fair bit of blood, but otherwise, there aren’t any serious injuries,’ the second medic informs them.

‘He has a sensitivity to narcotics,’ Hotch provides, unsure of what else he could possibly say.

‘I’ve been informed.’ The paramedic nods towards Morgan, whose arms are folded as he paces across the room.

‘Can I ride with him?’ Morgan asks, and it’s directed towards both the paramedics, and to Hotch. Hotch nods his assent, and watches as the stretcher is carried out of the room.

‘This isn’t your fault,’ Rossi tells him, the moment they’re alone.

Hotch gives him a look.

‘I’ve known you for a long time, Aaron. I know what you’re thinking. If you’d made that deal, things wouldn’t be any different.’

Hotch doesn’t answer – he’s not entirely convinced that Rossi’s right. He feels like somehow, he could have stopped this from happening.

‘What do we do, Dave?’ he asks, quietly, in a voice that he never, in a million years, would have used with any other member of the team.

‘We do what we always do,’ Rossi says grimly. ‘We catch the son of a bitch.’

**End Part Two.__**


	27. Ode to my Family

**The Waste Land**

Part Three: The Reaper’s Gambit

_And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.  
No one believed. They listened at his heart.  
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.  
No more to build on there. And they, since they  
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs._

**Robert Frost – Out, Out—**

_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,  
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,  
To the last syllable of recorded time;  
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools  
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!_

**William Shakespeare**

Chapter One – Ode to my Family (JJ)

Sleep catches her once or twice throughout the day, but never for very long. Every time she wakes, Will is still sitting by her side, and when he notices that her eyes are open, he’ll flash that charming Southern smile of his.

‘Any news?’ she groans, as she wakes for what feels like the thousandth time. His expression is a little more serious now.

‘Agent Morgan was in here briefly,’ he reveals. ‘They’ve found Reid, and he’s alive, but that’s all I know.’

JJ blinks.

That’s good news.  It’s not “Reid was never actually kidnapped in the first place, he just got caught up reading periodicals at the local library” but it’s better than “Reid’s dead.”

‘Find someone,’ she rasps. ‘Hotch, or Morgan…I need to…’

It’s kind of ridiculous; not even confined to a hospital bed can she pull herself away from the job. It’s like there’s some kind of mysterious magnetism, forever pulling her towards it. No escape.

What’s even scarier is that she doesn’t mind so much. The job is her life, just as much as Will and Henry are. At the same time, though, she’s not Hotch – if it comes down to a choice, then it’s not even going to be a difficult one. Hopefully, though, that’s not a decision she’s ever going to need to make.

Ten minutes later, Will returns with Morgan, whose brow seems as though it’s permanently creased. ‘How’re you doing?’ he asks her, in a strained voice.

‘Think I’m going to need to take some field leave,’ she replies, in a much weaker voice than she had intended. ‘What happened?’

Morgan hesitates. If it were Hotch, hesitation would have been a major warning bell, but Morgan isn’t Hotch – he has a completely different style to the Unit Chief. Things would be different with Morgan in charge. Weird, but different.

‘We got a phone call…from the Reaper. He killed our unsub, and left a message.’

JJ can feel her eyes widening. ‘Reid?’

‘He’s fine. He’ll have a few scars, but that’s the job, right?’ JJ doesn’t even need to ask to know that he’s talking about both mental and physical scars, because Morgan’s right. That is the job.

The Reaper, though…They’d prepared for this eventuality, but it had fallen to the wayside after the revelation that they had been dealing with a copycat. To know that he’s back, after everything they’ve already been through.

It sucks, to put it lightly. Really, really lightly.

There’s a reason why they usually have at least three or four days between cases. Try as they might to prove otherwise, the team is only human. They can’t function like this – if two agents hospitalized is what they get from a copycat, then she can only imagine what’s going to come out of the Reaper himself.

The Reaper seems a fitting name.

Harbinger of death.

The question really is, “whose death?”

‘Reid said that the Reaper told him he’d kidnapped some girls – we’ll know more when he’s conscious. Hotch wants to give him a cognitive interview.’

JJ almost laughs. ‘Is it likely that he’s even forgotten anything?’

‘We’ll see,’ Morgan says grimly.

JJ tries to pull herself into a seated position, trying not to wince at the pain that shoots through her abdomen. ‘The doctor says I can get out of here by tomorrow – I can help.’

Her suggestion is met by immediate dismissal from both Morgan and Will.

‘You’re still recovering, JJ,’ Morgan says, while Will simultaneously declares, ‘Over my dead body.’

JJ rolls her eyes. It’s just her luck to be with two of the most protective men she has ever met in her lifetime. Still, she doubts that Rossi or Hotch or any other member of the team would have a different response; that’s family for you.

‘I’ve booked a hotel room; you’re going to spend the next seven days _resting,_ chere,’ Will assures her, though it’s not much of an assurance. As much as she enjoys resting, she’s not sure she can do it while the Reaper is on the loose.

‘And we’re going to post a guard on your room,’ Morgan adds. ‘Chances are, he’s going to go after one of the team.’

‘Is that what the profile says?’

‘That’s what the profile says,’ Morgan confirms.

It’s not a particularly comforting thought.


	28. Weary Hearts

Chapter Two – Weary Hearts (Garcia)

Reid’s safe.

That’s all she knows so far, thanks to a short, somewhat terse conversation with Emily. It sends up all kinds of red warning flags, because usually, Emily is second only to Morgan in her levels of in-call flirting. It’s only when the situation is _really_ bad that she starts treating everyone like they’re Strauss.

The next call she gets is from Rossi, who has an undercurrent of anger in his voice that doesn’t bode well for anyone.

‘What’s going on?’ she asks, the slightest bit fearful. ‘Emily didn’t-’

‘_Foyet’s back_,’ he tells her, and Garcia blinks, sure that she had somehow misheard Rossi’s words.

‘What?’

‘_Foyet killed our unsub. According to Reid, he’s been busy._’

‘Are you sure this is it? I mean…he didn’t just do this because he was pissed that someone was copying him, and he’s going back into hiding?’

‘_I don’t think so, Garcia,_’ he says in a somber voice. It’s usually a cold day in hell before David Rossi speaks somberly. ‘_If what he told Reid is true, he’s kidnapped four teenage girls. I’m willing to bet that he wants us to try and find them, if they’re even missing in the first place. Morgan’s going to get what he can at the hospital; Emily, Hotch and I will be back soon. Make sure that computer’s still running._’

‘Always is, sir.’ Rossi hangs up. ‘Oh, jenkies,’ Garcia mutters. ‘This is not good.’ Really, it’s an understatement. Like saying that _Battlefield Earth _isn’t a particularly good movie, or that having your heart ripped from your chest is just a little bit painful. _What have we done to deserve this?_ she thinks to herself. First Richard Carson, now George Foyet. Maybe someone on the team been murdering puppies lately, because this is some seriously ridiculous karma.

When they get back to Quantico, she is going to nag until they all take some kind of vacation. Already, they’re looking at two weeks in Hawaii with sun and sea and surf and colorful drinks with umbrellas in them. She will make that happen, even if she has to hack the entire FBI computer system. Hotch is going to find the lock to his office door mysteriously changed, with no key in sight, if that’s what it takes.

In their absence, she starts printing out the relevant data for the whiteboard. The profile’s similar, but not the same, and the victim count is markedly higher. The stakes are higher, too. Even if Carson had wreaked havoc, Foyet has the potential to do so much worse.

It’s another half an hour before the terrible trio return. They all look ridiculously exhausted, though none more than Hotch, who seems to make it worse by trying to hide it. Of all the unsubs they’ve hunted in the past, Foyet is the one that has the best claim to the title of Hotch’s nemesis. The Lex Luthor to his Superman, the Joker to his Batman, the Red Skull to his Captain America.

‘How’s Reid?’ is the first question she asks. She doesn’t like being out of the loop, and hacking hospital records only gets her so far.

‘In surgery,’ Rossi tells her. ‘Carson didn’t do too much damage, but the Reaper…he carved the eye of providence into his chest.’

Garcia’s eyes widen in shock, but she doesn’t miss the reaction of both Hotch and Emily. Guilt. It’s like a whole team worth of Atlases. Taking the world on their shoulders. Fighting over who gets to take the blame.

‘Oh my stars and garters,’ she says, shaking her head. Even without the scars, they’d be remembering this for a long time, Reid perhaps more than any of them.

‘We need to find out what Foyet’s plan is,’ announces Hotch, moving towards the whiteboard. ‘He almost certainly has some kind of vendetta against the team for what happened last time, so I want everyone on double alert.’

Emily slides into the chair next to Garcia. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Sorry I was so short with you on the phone. Things were a little chaotic.’

‘That’s okay,’ Garcia smiles. It’s not the time to be holding ridiculous grudges about who’s upset who. ‘You can make it up for me by sitting through the _Key to Time_ arc next time we marathon _Doctor Who_.’

‘Deal,’ Emily says with a laugh, but it’s forced, which is unsurprising. Foyet had been hard enough to deal with the first time around. This time, Garcia has a gut feeling that it’s going to be so, so much worse.

She isn’t wrong.


	29. Ouroboros

Chapter Three – Ouroboros

The room feels a little empty, with just the four of them there. For a long time, David Rossi had been used to working alone. During his tenure at the original BAU, things had been very different. One agent working one case, the closest thing to a team-up being casual conversations over coffee in that coffin they called a break room.

Back then, the burn out rate had been high. Without a team, there’s no-one to keep you in check. Without a team, there’s no-one left to catch you when you’re falling. Sometimes it feels like they’re always falling, though that’s something that David Rossi would never admit to.

JJ and Reid are both still hospitalized, and probably will be until after they’ve solved the case. Morgan is with Reid, finding out what he can about Foyet’s plan. Without that information, there isn’t much they can do.

Still, Garcia’s looking through all the missing persons that have been reported sometime in the last week. Even with the age and gender constraints put into place, it’s a depressingly high number. Teenage girls are frequently victimized demographic.

The think about George Foyet, though is that he doesn’t do anything randomly; there’s rhyme and reason to his deed. He returns to killing after Tom Shaunessy’s death. He stabs himself, _sixty-seven times,_ just to avoid suspicion. He kills a busload of people after Hotch refuses to deal. He kills a Reaper copycat, just to taunt the team. He carves the eye of _fucking_ providence into Spencer Reid’s chest, just to make a point.

It’s the kind of grandiose, narcissistic behavior that fits the profile. That’s what it always comes down to. No matter how much detective work they do, no matter how many doors they kick down, no matter how many suspects they interrogate, it always comes down to the task for which they had been chosen.

Knights of the Round table, Garcia calls them sometimes.

Malignant narcissism, they call it; Narcissistic Personality Disorder with a side order of sociopathy. This is the diagnosis that many psychologists give Hitler and Stalin and Hussein. Dictators aren’t the ones that David Rossi is interested in, though; malignant narcissism is also a description that can be given to H. H. Holmes – widely regarded as the first serial killer.

That’s misnomer, though.

Serial killers have been around for a lot longer than two hundred years – it’s the public fascination that’s a little more recent.

Rossi has no doubt that people would have been fascinated by a serial killer six hundred years ago; human nature hasn’t changed. Society has changed. Women send packages of their underwear to convicted murderers, join fan clubs, buy memorabilia. Hell, Richard Carson had _killed_ people because of Foyet. That’s a little different though, because it had been more exploitation than hero worship, but there are other cases. He remembers Lower Canaan. It’s horrifying, and yet fascinating at the same time.

But that will never change.

A hundred years from now, it will still be the same. The methods will change, but the enthrallment stays the same, and that’s what encourages people like George Foyet to kill. ‘_It’s like writing an anti-glacier book,_’ Prentiss had said once, and Rossi wasn’t exactly sure what she’d meant by that, so he’d asked for clarification. It was with a blush that she’d replied. ‘_It’s from _Slaughterhouse-Five. _There’s a character who says that writing anti-war books is as much use as writing an anti-glacier book, because wars are about as easy to stop as glaciers. Sometimes it feels like serial killers fit into the same group._’ He’d pondered that thought for a while – Vonnegut had always been a little too existential, a little too self-referential for his own tastes.

She’s got a point, though – while their solve rates might have gone up since the start of the BAU, the murder rate hasn’t gone down. It doesn’t matter how many books he writes on the matter, it still seems like they’re running on a treadmill. A pretty bumpy treadmill.

George Foyet is a big bump.

‘I’ve got names,’ Morgan announces, as he enters the room.

‘That’s all Foyet game him?’ Emily asks, sounding a little crestfallen.

Morgan grimaces. ‘Not exactly. He also said that they’d be dead within twenty-four hours, if we can’t find them.’

‘So what do we do?’ Garcia asks, sounding a little frantic. Unsurprising. They’ve been under pressure before, but it’s always hard – especially for Garcia.

Hotch stands tall, an imposing force. It’s the kind of force Foyet should be scared of, but he’s not.

‘We find them,’ Hotch says.


	30. Evil

Chapter Four –  Evil (Morgan)

Morgan briefly wonders when he’d last slept. It’s at least twenty-four hours, by his count, but then, he hasn’t really been counting. When you’re on the case for days at a time, they all seem to blur together. Maybe they’ve been in Boston one day, maybe they’ve been there five. It _feels_ like they’ve been there an eternity.

There are four names scrawled on the whiteboard. The four girls – women – that George Foyet had taken. Victimology’s important – they want to know why he took these women – but more than that, they need to examine Foyet’s psychopathology. Morgan gets the feeling that they’ve only really scratched the surface.

It’s the question that they always seem to come back to.

Why do people kill?

Over the course of his career, Morgan has had a dozen different answers to that question. _Because they’re scumbags. Because they need to. Because they had a shitty childhood._ None of those answers ever seem sufficient.

He’s not sure what he believes. He might believe in God and the Devil, in Heaven and Hell, but so often, those beliefs have been challenged by the things that he sees every day. After all, what benevolent God would let a nine-year-old girl be raped and tortured by a sexual sadist.

_I believe that there are evil acts, but those are choices, brain chemistry._

If there’s ever an unsub that’s made him believe that it’s truly possible to be evil, it’s George Foyet.

Maybe in six months he’ll be thinking the same thing about a completely different unsub.

‘I don’t think this is about the victims,’ he says, eventually, gaining the attention of the only other people in the room: Prentiss and Garcia. Hotch is talking to the Lieutenant, and Rossi’s off somewhere – bathroom, maybe. According to the timeline that Foyet had given Reid, they’ve got a little under twenty hours left. It might as well be twenty minutes, considering how little they’ve found so far. Garcia’s trawled through their victims’ histories, but has found nothing that connects them, save their age and gender. Foyet might be an omnivore, but he’s also, as Rossi had postulated, a hebephile. There are just some victims that excite him a little more than all the rest.

‘What do you mean?’ Garcia asks, frowning. Prentiss gives him a raised eyebrow, waiting for the explanation.

‘From the start, the victims have always been a secondary consideration to the officers investigating the case. He wants to be noticed – to be remembered, and that’s more about how we respond to him, than who he kills. He wouldn’t have had much time to hunt new victims.’

‘Unless he was manipulating Carson from the start,’ Prentiss suggests, and Morgan gives a frown.

‘Would he, though? It’s not as though he could have framed the guy.’ He sighs. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’ He stares at the whiteboard for a few moments longer. ‘I still think we should be focusing on Foyet.’

‘I know,’ Prentiss says. ‘It’s just…we’ve been through every part of George Foyet’s file with a fine-tooth comb. You know as well as I do that some nights, Hotch goes over them again and again, looking for something he might have missed. What else is there to find?’

‘There’s a reason he’s the Boston Reaper,’ Morgan taps his pen against his left hand. ‘He could have gone to any city, but he stayed here. Maybe there’s somewhere that has meaning – a childhood home, or something.’

‘Or maybe somewhere that has meaning to _us_,’ Emily countered. ‘If he wants to send a message…’

The words hang in the air; it’s not outside the realm of possibility, but they’ve already lost far too much on this case already. If Foyet wants to send a message, then Morgan seriously doubts that it’s going to be a happy one. Bullets and slit throats, rather than puppies and sunshine.

He shakes his head. ‘You should both get some sleep,’ he tells Garcia and Prentiss, and they both stare at him like he’s grown an extra head. ‘We’re running in circles,’ he adds. ‘I think we’ll all be able to think better after a few hours of rest.’

‘So what about you then, genius?’ Garcia asks. ‘Unless you haven’t noticed, there are only two sofas in this police station. _Because_,’ she continues, talking over Morgan before he can even get a word out. ‘You’d have to be completely insane if you think that we’re going back to the hotel now.’

‘We’ll take it in shifts,’ he says hastily, ignoring the dark look from Emily that says “you have _got_ to be kidding me.”

But she doesn’t argue, and maybe that’s a testament to how tired they all are, and how little they really have to go on.

There’s a voice in his head that whispers _evil never sleeps,_ but he ignores it.


	31. Darkest Before the Dawn

Chapter Five – Darkest Before the Dawn (Hotch)

Outside, the sun is rising. The rain, it seems, has stopped for the moment, and the sky is free of clouds. If Hotch were to walk out the front door, he’d see a brilliant display of blue and orange, but he doesn’t.

He stands, staring at the whiteboard.

It’s Rossi and Morgan’s turn to be sleeping, so Prentiss and Garcia are the ones sitting at the table, going through the files. Garcia’s significantly less perky than usual, and Prentiss seems to be on her third cup of coffee since she’d woken up. Another day, Hotch might have sent everyone back to the hotel, but today he doesn’t.

This case is too important.

_Foyet_ is too important to slip through their fingers once again.

‘We’re missing something,’ he says, and there’s no immediate response.

Eventually, Garcia says, ‘I think we’re missing a _lot_ of things.’

It’s true in more ways than one: they’re missing Reid and JJ. They’re missing Rossi and Morgan. They’re missing George Foyet.

‘Missing breakfast,’ Prentiss adds, turning another page on the file.

‘Boston is where it all began. It’s where the Reaper started his killing. There’s a reason for that. There’s a reason he came back.’ It’s the same reasoning they’ve repeated, over and over again, but it doesn’t seem to lead to anything. There are no breakthroughs, no sudden moments of truth.

‘Well it’s definitely not the weather,’ Prentiss quips, adding with a slight blush, ‘Sorry. I get snarky.’

‘We’ve noticed, sunshine.’ Garcia gives her a small smile, but there’s no levity. There’s a short beep from her laptop, and both Emily and Garcia give a start. She’s been running searches all night; different aliases, with different parameters. Anything that might help them find George Foyet.

‘Okay, in the Boston area, no Kevin Baskin, Miles Holden or William Parker has purchased Oxycontin or Tapazole or any generics of said brands any time in the last six months,’ Garcia announces.

‘But he knows we know those aliases,’ Emily points out. ‘He could be using a new one.’

‘Bring up a list,’ Hotch instructs Garcia, who follows up the command with thirty seconds worth of rapid typing. ‘Everyone in the Boston area who’s bought those drugs. Same time frame.’

‘He’s probably working in a computer science area,’ Emily adds. ‘And he’s probably changed his appearance in some way. Every single person within a hundred miles knows what the Boston Reaper looks like.’

 ‘Okay, this might take a while,’ Garcia informs them – since she’s running off her laptop, rather than her main system, processing power is slower.

It takes one hour and seventeen minutes.

In the meantime, Rossi and Morgan had made their return, and the whole team, minus JJ and Reid, are sitting around, as the tension climbs.

Garcia scrolls down the list.

‘Stop!’ Morgan calls out. ‘Stop. There.’ He points at the screen. ‘Search that one – Peter Rhea.’

‘Peter Rhea?’ Garcia asks with a frown.

‘The Reaper,’ Hotch says, flatly. It’s been sitting in front of them the whole time.

The DMV records for Peter Rhea show a man with a shaved head and a beard. He’s a little pudgier around the cheeks, but beneath all of that, Aaron Hotchner can see the dark, empty eyes of the Boston Reaper. Sometimes, he feels like he’s at the point where he sees that emptiness in everyone.

‘This is it,’ Prentiss says, a little stunned. ‘We have an address.’

‘Doesn’t this seem a little too easy?’ Morgan asks with a frown.

Nobody answers.


	32. Left Behind

Chapter Six – Left Behind (Reid)

Reid’s chest is a mess of stitches and bandages: several hundred stitches in all, because an all-seeing eye carved into human flesh is no small wound.

3000 B.C. is the earliest reported use of surgical sutures, but there have been a lot of advancements since then. If there’s no infection, and he doesn’t exert himself too much, then the stitches will be removed in seven to ten days.

By that time, he reasons, the team will have captured Foyet, rescued the missing girls, and flown home to Quantico. By that time, they’ll all be on either medical leave or stress leave, because Section Chief Strauss takes reappearances of nemeses very seriously. After what had happened to Elle and to Gideon, nobody’s taking any chances.

Aside from the massive scar that will be with him for the rest of his life, there’s little other damage. Physically speaking, at least.

He’s read enough textbooks to know the dangers of PTSD, and even though he won’t admit it to anyone, chances are he’s probably experienced it, too. As much as everyone would like to pretend they’re fine after a harrowing experience, fine is probably the _least_ appropriate word.

_Freaked out, insecure, neurotic and emotional_, is what Garcia would say, and it’s not all that far from the truth.

Still, he’s going to miss Foyet’s takedown, and that’s something that he wistfully regrets. Even if he _does_ get left behind at police stations that much more often than the rest of the team. He wonders if deep down, Hotch is trying to protect him from something, because Reid is the brains, not the brawn, and he failed his physical _and_ his gun qualifications one year, and really, chicks only dig scars on shapely, muscular men, no matter what Morgan says.

He calls a nurse over with the button beside his bed, and asks – carefully, because he’s refused all meds and it _hurts_ to talk – if he can go visit JJ. The nurse gives him an almost maternal frown, but goes off to fetch a wheelchair anyway. He wonders how many of her patients have been carved up by serial killers.

JJ’s room is just down the hallway, but for all the steps Reid can actually take of his own accord, it might as well be a hundred miles.

Will’s asleep in the chair by the bed, snoring softly. It’s mid-morning, but the chairs don’t look particularly comfortable, so it’s easy to believe that actually getting to sleep had taken most of the night.

‘Hey, Spence,’ JJ whispers, her voice hoarse and a little softer than usual. The nurse gives him a small smile, and leaves, telling him in no uncertain terms not to wander off without calling her back.

‘Hey, JJ.’ He edges the wheelchair a little closer to the bed, wincing at the strain across his chest, and puts a hand on her. Her own wounds are, for all intents and purposes, much worse than his. She might not have several hundred stitches, but the knife had plunged deeper, damaging organs and causing massive blood loss.

She’s lucky to be alive.

Luck, of course, doesn’t factor into it. It’s all a matter of timing, geographic location, and the fact that their original unsub didn’t have the medical training to execute an accurate – _fatal_ – stab.

George Foyet might believe in fate, but Spencer Reid believes in science.

A different person might say that, based upon the law of averages, they’re due a death sometime soon, because it’s been six years since the last ones and really, maybe it’s time. That’s the gambler’s fallacy, and for Spencer Reid, it falls into the same category as things like “everything happens for a reason” – speculation based on the human need to find meaning.

Previous attempts have no impact on future, independent trials, unless they do. The roulette wheel can land on red three times, and then on red again. A butterfly flaps its wings, and causes a hurricane months later, but that’s chaos theory, which is based on math and science and interconnectivity, not just chance.

Every single moment of his life so far has led him to this hospital room, rather than anywhere else in the world, but that’s not fate. Maybe in another universe, he’s teaching English Literature and sporting a ponytail and wearing jeans, but not in this one.

In this one, he’s in a wheelchair in his friend’s hospital room, with a bandaged chest, and nerve impulses firing rapidly. Pain signals travel at around two feet per second, slower than both touch (250 feet per second) and muscular movement (390 feet per second). Speed of the nerve impulse had been his very first college Psychology experiment, but that’s not to say he hadn’t already known the answer.

Sometimes, thinking about these things, going over the facts and figures in his mind, helps distract from that deep seated urge, like bugs crawling beneath the skin (formication, derived from the Latin _formica_, meaning ant. A symptom of menopause, diabetic neuropathy, skin cancer and syphilis. In addition to this, formication is a side effect of prescription drugs as well as cocaine and amphetamines. It is also a withdrawal symptom. Not to be confused with fornication).

Medically speaking, the itch he gets isn’t from formication, but sometimes it feels that way.

Will wakes with a yawn and a stretch, and it doesn’t take him long to see Spencer there. ‘Hey Reid,’ the man says with a smile. ‘How’re you holding up?’

Reid smiles back. ‘I’m fine,’ he says.


	33. Strength

The SUV feels a little empty as they drive out to the address that Garcia had provided them. Normally, there would be three to a vehicle, but with both JJ and Reid in the hospital, it’s just Morgan and Prentiss, with Hotch and Rossi in the car in front. They have a SWAT team as well, because today, they’re pulling out all the stops.

This time, George Foyet will not fool them again.

If Morgan has to tackle the man off of a god damned cliff, George Foyet will not escape.

Already, they have lost too much.

‘This feels wrong,’ Emily says suddenly. She hasn’t said a word since they’d left the station, and really, it’s not the kind of thing that Morgan wants to hear. After all, he feels it too.

It seems like it should be harder.

Like maybe, the house is just another false lead, and they’ll be back to square one. Like maybe Peter Rhea is just an uncanny doppelganger. Like maybe they’re completely and utterly wrong about all of this, and everything is about to go to hell.

So yeah. He feels it.

He feels his heart thumping, and he feels the adrenaline pumping, and he feels the fear pushing at the edges of the barrier his mind had constructed to keep it trapped. Fear is something that he cannot let himself feel right now, no matter the circumstances.

‘Everything is going to be okay,’ Morgan says, and Emily gives him that incredulous look that she’s so damn good at, that might as well say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

But she doesn’t say anything, because really, she’s probably thinking the exact same thing.

The house is a long way out of town, which is never a good sign. Apartments in inner-city buildings, there are always people watching, there are cameras in hallways, cameras on the streets. Out here, there are a lot of wide open spaces.

There are advantages and disadvantages to every single kind of terrain, when it comes to tactical operations. A place like this, there are fewer bystanders to get caught in the crossfire, but there are also a lot more opportunities for traps and the like. It’s harder to put landmines around an apartment building.

Once, a couple of years back now, they had come across an unsub’s property that had landmines in the surrounding acreage. It had very nearly ended bloodily, but it didn’t.

George Foyet might not be the kind of guy that would use landmines, but he has other quirks, other tricks up his sleeve. Really, they have to be prepared for anything.

The Behavioral Analysis Unit, better known as “Grown-up Boy Scouts,” only they don’t have any merit badges. Well. Maybe just one badge.

‘Nice place to live,’ Emily says noncommittally, in what sounds like an attempt at changing the subject.

‘You lived in Boston?’ he asks, curious.

‘For a little while,’ she shrugs, and it sounds like there is so much more to it, but he doesn’t ask.

She’s not wrong – Boston is a nice-looking city, with a lot of old buildings. He’d never come here on holiday, though. The streets are paved with stones of blood.

Every potential holiday destination is.

Boston, Florida, Chicago. Hell, even Jamaica had been interrupted by untimely serial killer activity.

When this is all over, he’s going to take a proper holiday. Maybe to some monk retreat at the top of a mountain, where they aren’t even allowed to speak. Knowing his luck, they’d probably be into human sacrifice anyway.

Maybe it’s time to move on.

It’s not a thought that he particularly likes, but it’s the conclusion that the world keeps bringing him to. They just keep moving deeper and deeper into the abyss. One day, they’ll be trapped for eternity.

Maybe they already are.

The SUV pulls to a stop half a mile down the road from Peter Rhea’s address. If he’s in there, they don’t want to tip him off. Unfortunately, that’s just another one of those disadvantages.

Morgan pulls on his Kevlar vest, and checks his weapon. He slips a hand into his pocket and feels the cold metal of Foyet’s bullet.

In a way, it comforts him. It strengthens him.

Because the one thing they all need right now is strength.


	34. In Your Head

Chapter Eight – In Your Head (Prentiss)

Aaron Hotchner stands tall, but it doesn’t take a profiler to see the weight of the world on his shoulders. He, more than any of them, has the right to call George Foyet his nemesis, and Prentiss does not envy him in the least.

She has her own demons, after all.

Not that any of the team knows about Ian Doyle, or what had happened in Boston eight years prior.

‘As far as we know, Foyet has hostages,’ Hotch says. ‘Our priority is to make sure that they get out of there alive.’ She wonders how much it pains him to say that. She wonders how far he would go to ensure that George Foyet never kills again.

It’s a dark path.

There are two SWAT teams, in addition to four profilers and not insignificant number of police officers. Practically an army.

Morgan pulls a property blueprint that Garcia had found for them. There’s a farmhouse with attached barn, as well as an equipment shed, and some other, smaller buildings. It’s like just another raid, only somehow, it’s the most important raid they’ve ever been on.

‘Morgan, Prentiss and Team 1 – we’re taking the main house. Rossi and Team 2 – the equipment shed. Do _not_ underestimate Foyet – he is ruthless, and he is cunning, and he will not hesitate to kill every single person that gets in his way.’

_Except, _Emily adds to herself. _Except if he wants to toy with them._

She adjusts her vest, and her weapon, ignoring the throb of her head. The thing about having a history of head wounds, is that they have a compounding effect. Each one has a slightly greater chance of being her last, in the most morbid sense.

There’s not much cover, but they make use of what’s there. The house is huge, so the chances that Foyet is actually looking in their direction might be minimal, but she wouldn’t put it past him to have cameras set up.

If they had time, the SWAT team would probably sweep through first. If they had time, they would do a soft entrance, making sure that the Reaper isn’t tipped off before they can get close enough. If they had time, maybe they could have grabbed at least a couple of hours of sleep.

Right now, though, time is their most valuable commodity. The profile tells them that the Reaper won’t kill anyone before he’s sure he has an audience. Emily’s hoping like hell that the profile is right, because it would _suck_ to get this far, only to have Foyet slip through their fingers again, leaving only corpses in his wake.

‘How can he afford all of this?’ Emily mutters, as they draw closer. The house is well-maintained, and it doesn’t exactly look inexpensive. Maybe he’d spent time here over the last ten years. Waiting. Planning.

‘Guy’s an intelligent, narcissistic sociopath,’ Morgan replies. ‘I’m sure he found a way.’

It’s just another one of those things that they’ll have Garcia looking into, when this is all over. Something else that will make it into the inevitable “tell all” book that someone will write.

Hotch takes the back door, and Morgan the front, which leaves Emily to take the side door. Technically speaking, she follows the SWAT guys in. Their guns will pack a hell of a lot more punch than her Glock.

Inside is relatively bare.

It’s a little disquieting; every footstep seems to echo, and every shadow makes her feel as though Foyet is lurking just around the corner.

Nightmares aren’t just for when it’s dark outside. Not just for when she’s sleeping. Sometimes, every single waking hour is a nightmare.

She finds Morgan standing at a door near the far end of the house. The rest of the house is clear. Hotch is standing by him, hand pressed to his earpiece.

‘They have the girls,’ he says. ‘They were in the equipment shed. No sign of Foyet.’

‘Is that the door to the basement?’ Emily asks, and Morgan nods. He’d studied the blueprints a lot more thoroughly than she had, and in any case, he’s the one that has experience in architectural matters.

‘If he’s anywhere, he’ll be down here,’ Morgan says. He puts a hand to the metal of the doorknob, and Emily half expects an electric current to shoot through him.

He pushes the door open quietly, and starts descending into the darkness. Emily’s heart thumps in her chest, and she wonders if she is going to die today. His flashlight flickers on.

The thoughts of death don’t particularly bother her. That fact seems more terrifying than anything else, and yet it’s somehow so easy to push out of her mind. She follows Morgan downstairs, hyperaware of Hotch’s footsteps behind her.

‘Foyet,’ Morgan says, and it takes Emily half a second to realize that the Reaper is standing in Morgan’s torchlight. ‘Get on the ground, now.’

Foyet grins, and in the torchlight, it’s a terrifying thing. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?’ and then he’s running. A door slams shut, and Morgan swears, rushing off after him.

It’s dark, save for the bouncing light that comes from Morgan’s flashlight, and Emily’s half worried that she’s going to trip and break an arm, but if nothing else, then her adult life has taught her how to chase after an armed maniac in the dark (wearing heels, if need be, but that’s not the case today). Hotch calls for back-up, but she isn’t really paying that much attention.

Today, she just runs.

The basement is far longer than it should be, but it’s only when it starts to narrow that she realizes the reason for that. They’re not in the basement anymore.

It’s a passageway.

If it were any other unsub, she thinks that Hotch might give the order to stop, because they have no way of knowing what’s beyond.

They keep running.

She can’t hear footsteps ahead of them anymore. Maybe there had been a turn off at one point. Maybe he’d just dissolved into dust.

Maybe—

A deafening crack pierces the air, and Emily loses all focus. Her head rings, and she can’t see, and _what the fuck is going on?_

The concussion probably doesn’t help.

Her legs are falling out from underneath her, and she tries so damn hard to cling to reality, but apparently that’s not on the agenda. Her head hits the floor with a thud.

In her last moments of consciousness, she sees the smiling face of George Foyet.


	35. The Lone Wolf

Chapter Nine – The Lone Wolf (Rossi)

There is a reason that David Rossi never had children.

It’s not that he doesn’t like them. It’s just that he’s not exactly father material. Instead, he’s the rich uncle that is always buying presents.

He puts an arm around the shoulder of a girl that can’t stop crying. She’s seventeen – so close to being an adult, and yet so damn far. The perils of teenage life are no preparation for the real world, for things like rapists and serial killers.

‘It’s okay,’ he tells her, which is something of a lie. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’ Still a lie.

Foyet hadn’t hurt them. That’s one small favor. But it does bring up the harrowing confirmation at their thought that this kidnapping was only a means to an end – but what end?

Any other unsub, and he wouldn’t be so worried. Maybe that’s their downfall in some way – they’re all so busy waiting for Foyet to pull the wool over their eyes that might miss the obvious.

Half a minute later, the radio call comes through from Hotch, and it’s so garbled that Rossi can’t make out the details. He hears “Foyet” but that’s about it. That could be “Foyet’s not here,” or it could be “Foyet has a bomb and he’s going to kill us all.”

He’s not sure which one is more likely, but he’s not taking any chances.

Instructing the Boston police officers to stay with the girls until the ambulance gets there, he accompanies the S.W.A.T team to the main house.

Aside from the fact that the front door is kicked in, it’s as though nobody is even there.

In the basement, there’s one man, Kevlar, helmet and rifle. ‘There’s a secret passageway,’ he tells them, and Rossi just stares at him.

_A secret passageway_?

_Seriously?_

Foyet had ten years to put together his contingency plans. Rossi wouldn’t be surprised if they involved a submarine.

He pulls out his flashlight and shines it down the length of the passageway. Nothing but darkness.

There could be bodies at the other end. Maybe by the end of the day, he’ll be the only still living member of the Behavioral Analysis Unit. It’s not a comforting thought.

The passageway is at least half a mile long – by the time he reaches the end of it, he’s almost definitely no longer on the Reaper’s property.

The rest of the S.W.A.T team is congregating in what looks like another basement. That crafty bastard. He didn’t just own one property, he owned two, side by side.

‘He seems to have had a vehicle waiting, Agent Rossi,’ one of the S.W.A.T guys – “Richards” according to his uniform, says. There’s a long, awkward pause, at which point Rossi comes to the realization that Hotch, Morgan and Prentiss are nowhere to be seen.

‘Where’s Agent Hotchner?’ he asks, trying not to sound like he’s desperate, but really, the answer that he knows is coming is the answer that he dreads.

‘Agents Hotchner, Morgan and Prentiss were gone when we got here,’ Richards says apologetically. ‘It looks like he used a flashbang.’

He runs a hand across his head, trying to keep at least some semblance of calmness. Two agents in hospital, three in the hands of the most notorious serial killer that they’ve ever faced.

It’s almost like the olden days, the lone wolf on his own once more. Only he has something now that he didn’t have back then.

He has Penelope Garcia.

‘Call in a forensic unit,’ he orders Richards, before making the call he absolutely does not want to make.

‘_Did you get him?’ _Garcia’s voice is apprehensive, as though she’s expecting him to tell her that everybody is dead. Really, that’s not so far off.

‘No,’ he says bitterly. ‘We didn’t get him…He took Hotch, Morgan and Prentiss, Garcia.’

There’s a long silence. ‘_He _took _ them_?’

‘There was a passageway underneath the house that led to the neighboring property. He hit them with the flashbang at the end of the passageway and pulled them into the vehicle he had waiting.’

There’s a choked sob on the other end of the line. ‘_God, Rossi, we should have seen this?_’

‘How could we have seen _this_?’ he asks. ‘There are any number of things that Foyet could have done that we couldn’t have predicted. The profile can only do so much.’

‘_I know_,’ she says, and Rossi can hear the guilt in her voice.

‘I’m coming back there now, Garcia. We will _find_ them,’ he promises her.

If she senses the lie in his voice, she doesn’t say anything.


	36. Ticking

Chapter Ten – Ticking (Garcia)

She’s not sure who had called the hospital, but just after she hangs up with Rossi, a wheelchair bound Spencer Reid and Jennifer Jareau show up with William LaMontagne Junior in tow.

‘Are you two insane?’ she squeals. ‘You need to be in hospital – _resting_. If I find the nurse that let you out, I swear—’

‘Garcia,’ JJ interjects. Her voice is gravelly, and her eyes are tired, and Garcia wants nothing more than to wrap her sugar plum in a tight hug, but that really wouldn’t be very good for the stab wounds. ‘It’s a temporary thing – we…’ She stops to breathe, hand resting against her abdomen.

‘We need to be here,’ Reid finishes. Whatever pain he’s in, he’s trying not to let it show.

Garcia knows. Any single member of the BAU team would crawl across broken glass, would walk through flames, would travel to the end of the freaking universe, to save one another.

She settles, but she’s still not entirely pleased. Rossi will be here soon, and she wants to have every single detail about his properties and his financial history that she can find.

It’s not an easy task. Foyet has a lot of different aliases, and a lot of different revenue streams. He’s a computer nerd, but he’s not as good as she is.

There’s got to be a trail. There is _always _a trail. In the vastness of the internet, things do not disappear easily.

She types, searching through every alias. Then, she stops looking at the names, and looks at the consistencies instead. Maybe something in his M.O. will be able to narrow down the options.

After all, that’s what profiling is about. Probability.

They play the dice, and sometimes they win.

Sometimes they end up with two agents hospitalized and three missing.

It’s almost as though someone on the team has built up some _really_ shitty karma.

When Rossi arrives, he doesn’t even blink at JJ and Reid’s presence. ‘What do we have?’ he asks, sitting down at one end of the table.

‘Painfully little,’ Garcia frowns. ‘I ran the financials on the aliases from both properties. He seems to have bought a lot of hardware equipment several years back. I can imagine that he might have been able to pay someone cash under the table to do a bit of digging, literally speaking.’

Rossi nods. ‘No vehicles registered to any of his aliases?’

‘None that aren’t accounted for.’

The senior profiler lets his fingers run through his hair. Usually, the salt and pepper do is immaculate. Today it’s looking a little wild.

‘I need to call Strauss about this,’ he says eventually, standing.

‘You think they’ll bring in another team?’

Rossi shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. Probably. Truth told, we could use the help.’

He makes his departure, leaving Garcia with JJ, Reid and Will, all of whom are irritatingly silent. She tries not to imagine just what George Foyet is doing to her friends. She tries to think of it as just another case, with just another unsub. JJ and Reid are exhausted of walking around, and Hotch, Morgan and Prentiss are on a coffee run.

If only she could let herself believe that.

This is the reason she doesn’t like to get too close to the action. This is the reason she stays in her lair all day long, eyes strained from the glow of monitors. When it’s pictures, and paperwork, it’s somehow easier to deal with. She can switch windows and look at pandas and kittens instead.

Here, she can’t turn it off. It’s this omnipresent force, threatening to consume them all. No wonder everyone thinks that profilers are psychologically unstable.

After this, she’s going to need a petting zoo, at the very least.

When Rossi returns, he’s looking even worse than he had before, which suggests that the Strauss conversation had gone badly.

‘I’m going to go to the hospital to try and see if the girls Foyet kidnapped can give us anything announces. You four…keep digging.’

Garcia knuckles down, and begins to type once more.


	37. This is the Way the World Ends

Chapter Eleven – This is the Way the World Ends (Hotch)

He wakes up with his hands bound behind his back.

It had been a trap – an ambush – and even though they had been aware of that eventuality, they’d lost. Thanks to the exhaustion, and the hunger, and the emotional baggage of the first unsub, they’d been unprepared for the real threat. Foyet had outsmarted them for the second time, and there isn’t a bit of that that Aaron Hotchner doesn’t find horrifying.

They aren’t supposed to lose. Not like this.

Hotch knows well the horrors of the job; knows that the good balanced out the evil. Theoretically, at least. Today, all he can see is the darkness that is George Foyet. It hadn’t been enough to slip away into the shadows. This man – not even a man, really. Hotch has a bit of trouble thinking of the Reaper as even _human­ _– this man wants to be feared.

And what better way to do that than to kidnap a federal agent.

Hotch blinks, and notices that he isn’t alone. The Reaper had gone beyond that – he hadn’t kidnapped _one_ federal agent. He’d kidnapped _three_.

There is no way this is going to look good in paperwork, if they even survive to write up the paperwork, which Hotch is severely doubting right now. With Morgan and Prentiss beside him, still unconscious and Reid and JJ in the hospital recovering, the team isn’t exactly in a good position to pull him out of this. David Rossi is a fantastic agent – Hotch still values his judgment more than anyone else’s – but there’s a reason why the BAU works in teams.

They fit together, like some broken jigsaw puzzle, each showing a different part of the picture. There’s some overlap, and some gaps, but in the end, they work better as a unit than as each puzzle piece separately. Every time they lose someone, every time the boat tips over, they have to reorient, work out what they have between them, work out where the holes that need filling are.

Sometimes, though, there are holes that can’t be filled. Each case takes a little more away. There’s a reason why agents burn out so quickly. There’s a reason why they’re submitted to twice as many psych evaluations as members of other departments. It should be worth it in the end.

That’s what he keeps telling himself.

Only no matter how bad it gets, he can’t pull himself away.

That’s the BAU curse. Keep going until you crash and burn. Even when you can see it coming, you can’t let go, hands glued to the steering wheel.

‘Hotch?’ He hears Morgan’s voice, a little tired, a little confused. The younger man gets to his knees, unable to move much further without effort, thanks to the restraints on his wrists.

‘I’m here.’

‘Did Foyet…?’

‘Yeah,’ Hotch affirms. He doesn’t even need to hear the end of that sentence.

‘Shit,’ the other agent mutters, which is something of an understatement. In the hands of any other unsub, they might have had a fighting chance, but George Foyet doesn’t do anything by halves. ‘How’s Emily?’

‘She’s breathing,’ Hotch announces, unable to get his hands in the position to take a pulse. ‘But there’s some blood.’

‘I think hit my head again on my way down,’ Emily says, her eyes still closed. ‘It doesn’t count as a second concussion, so _no_, Morgan, you can’t collect on that bet I know you have with Rossi.’ Hotch breathes a sigh of relief. She’s been awake for a while, apparently, and the deadpan snark is a good sign. They’re all alive, and they’re all relatively unharmed. For now. He gets the feeling that it isn’t going to stay that way for long.

‘You shouldn’t have been in the field,’ Morgan says angrily, and Hotch knows that he’s feeling more than a little guilty. It had been his call that had drawn them into Foyet’s trap, but then, Hotch knows he would have done the exact same thing, everything considered.

Emily, however, finds a way to say it in much better terms; ‘Cut the crap, Morgan.’ Morgan’s eyes widen in what might be fear, but there’s definitely some anger there too. Fear and anger at the fact that there’s no immediate way out of this. There’s no convenient hairclip to pick the lock of their handcuffs, there’s no perfectly placed vent to crawl into, there’s no mysteriously unlocked door. There is only a dark, silent room, with no way out.

No way out but death.

It’s not the death that Aaron Hotchner is worried about. It’s the stuff that’s going to happen in between. The fact that he will give up almost anything for his team isn’t a secret. Foyet will manipulate that.

Whatever comes next isn’t going to be pretty.

The door swings open, as if Foyet had been watching them – something that’s probably true. He can’t see any cameras in the room, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

‘Good afternoon,’ Foyet says, with a smile that Hotch can best describe as lecherous. This is the last face that every single one of the Reaper’s victims had seen before death. If he were a different man, Aaron Hotchner might have been terrified.

As it stands, this situation is new to him; he’s been on the other side of this so, so many times. He’s seen and heard his team members kidnapped, held hostage, damn near beaten to death, but it’s never been him. Not like this. He has no bargaining chips, no aces up his sleeve.

All he has is the profile.

‘It’s so nice to see you, Agent Hotchner. Just think, if you’d taken that deal, we wouldn’t be here. Was it worth the trade-off?’

Hotch’s heart skips a beat.

‘We don’t make deals,’ he repeats, in that same controlled voice that he had used last time. In theory, at least. His voice is shaking. Hell, his whole _body_ is shaking, and he wonders if even the handcuffs are enough to stop him from pounding the Reaper into a pulpy, bloody mess.

‘That’s right, Agent Hotchner. The Unit Chief must always be a source of moral guidance. He doesn’t make deals. He needs to be in control. He needs to protect his team. That kind of grandiosity is a little narcissistic, don’t you think?’ Foyet’s words take on a scheming tone, and Hotch is hyperaware of the revolver that is now pressed up against the back of his skull. Maybe he could flip around, and kick Foyet’s legs out from underneath him. Maybe Rossi will kick the door down, gun blazing. Maybe pigs will fly.

‘Your own behavior suggests a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder,’ Hotch provides. ‘You believe yourself to be unique – special, in some way. Your sense of entitlement and lack of empathy lead to overtly arrogant behavior. But know this – you are nothing.’

The Reaper laughs, leaning down beside Hotch, breath hot against his ear. When Foyet speaks, his voice is a whisper, but it’s loud enough that he knows both Morgan and Prentiss can hear him.

‘You are going to die, knowing that you couldn’t save them.’

Aaron Hotchner’s eyes are open, and for one split second, he lets the fear show.

Foyet pulls the trigger.


	38. Not with a Bang

Chapter Twelve – Not with a Bang (Prentiss)

Emily Prentiss is determined not to look down.

She knows what’s there – lying dead, unmoving. She’d heard the bullet, felt the blood hit her face, seen his body fall to the ground with a thud. Lifeless. An empty vessel.

She doesn’t look down.

Breath comes in short, fast gulps, and the bile in her throat is threatening to erupt. She’s barely clinging to sanity, to stoicism. All Emily wants is to break down in tears.

Morgan probably has a look of despair on his face, but Emily can’t bring herself to look.

She doesn’t need to look to know that George Foyet has is smiling, but she does anyway: it’s a wicked, ruthless, lecherous smile. If there’s one time in her life that Emily has seriously considered cold-blooded murder, it’s right now. Only really, it’s not so cold-blooded. It’s justified.

This is the man that has torn them apart. This is the man that has just killed Aaron Hotchner.

George Foyet leans down, his hand brushing against her cheek. ‘You look so beautiful in red,’ he whispers, letting his fingers trail along the drying blood that had splattered her face.

Hotch’s blood.

Not just blood, either.

Head shots from large caliber bullets aren’t pretty, and she tries not to think about what that might look like. Already, her face is starting to itch, and she feels like the most important thing in the world right now is a hot shower, to wash away the stains.

She’ll scrub, and scrub, but she knows that she will probably feel this blood splatter for the rest of her life.

_Out, damned spot._

Hopefully, though, she’ll have a better ending than Lady Macbeth. Right now, that doesn’t look likely.

_You’re going to die, knowing that you couldn’t save them._ The last words Aaron Hotchner ever heard echo in her mind. The Reaper is going to make this worth his while.

Foyet twirls the gun like it’s some kind of toy, as though he hadn’t just used it to kill Hotch. He spins the chamber of the revolver, and lets it click back into place. Emily’s not stupid enough to think that he might end it all with a single bullet, and yet deep down, part of her is begging for that way out.

‘We are going to play a game,’ Foyet announces. He turns away from them and walks to a nearby table to retrieve something – exactly what it is, Emily can’t quite tell. ‘This is a game in which one of you will live, and one of you will die.’

He leans down and cuts the bonds that tie Morgan’s hands together. ‘Agent Morgan – the choice is yours.’

‘Me – kill me,’ he says almost instantly, and even though his hands are free, Emily can tell that he isn’t in a position to fight back. Not like this.

‘Are you sure?’ Foyet asks, his voice teasing. ‘You know what’s going to happen if I kill you? I am going to have a _very_ lovely time with Agent Prentiss, by the end of which she will wish she were dead. But the choice is yours,’ he repeats. He pulls the gun from his waistband and hands it over.

‘Make your decision.’

For the first time, Emily lets herself turn to look into Morgan’s eyes. They’re afraid – an emotion that she knows is mirrored in her own.

There is no way that this can end well, and Morgan is left with an impossible choice. ‘I can take it,’ she whispers, letting her eyes close. She doesn’t want to see his reaction to what she’s going to say next. ‘Whatever you need to do, I can take it.’

She doesn’t believe her own words.

It’s an impossible choice.

In a way, she’s almost glad that she’s not the one making it, but she trusts Morgan to do what’s right. The problem though, is that what’s _right_ is under serious contention.

When she opens her eyes, she sees Morgan’s hands shaking, revolver gripped tightly. ‘I can’t let you go through that, Em.’ She gives a slight, mirthless chuckle at the rarely used moniker. In a macabre way, it’s almost fitting that she hears it now, at the moment of her death.

‘I know,’ she whispers, but it’s still a knife in the gut when she sees the barrel pointing towards her. Morgan chokes back a sob, and that’s what reminds her that it’s real, because Derek Morgan isn’t a touchy-feely kind of guy.

She closes her eyes – to protect both of them from the pain, the fear.

She doesn’t hear the bang.


	39. But With a Whimper

Chapter Thirteen – But with a Whimper (Morgan)

He lifts the gun at the last second, so that it’s pointed towards Foyet, instead of Emily.

The hammer clicks into an empty chamber.

Morgan’s heart drops.

In retrospect, it makes sense – there’s no way Foyet would take the control out of his own hands, and he does have a penchant for sadistic psychomanipulation, but for a split second, Derek Morgan had let himself hope.

Emily opens her eyes, blinking back tears, and she looks confused for a few seconds before realization hits. Then her expression turns to one of horror.

‘I’ll admit, your dedication was almost convincing,’ Foyet comments. ‘I almost believed that you were really going to kill her. Make no mistake, she will die. But not until after I’ve had my little bit of fun.’

Morgan snaps.

He is sick of George Foyet and his endless mind games. He’s sick of sitting around waiting for something to happen. So he takes action.

The gun drops from his grip, and he pulls himself upwards, simultaneously diving into a tackle. His ankles are still tied together, but he doesn’t need those to punch. His fist strikes Foyet’s face once, twice, before the other man manages to roll them, and gain the advantage.

Derek Morgan has a lot of experience at self-defense, but he’s injured, tired and angry – none of which are very good for winning this fight.

His head slams against the concrete floor, and everything goes fuzzy for a second. He needs to get up, to fight back, but he knows that that isn’t going to be happening any time soon.

Something hard digs into his thigh.

Is it the gun?

No. The gun’s a couple of feet away, but not out of reach. Whatever’s digging into his thigh is in his pocket.

The bullet.

There is a freaking_ bullet_ in his pocket.

The bullet that George Foyet had left with his unconscious body all those months ago. The bullet that he has kept on his person ever since.

For one spilt second, Derek Morgan believes in fate.

For one split second, he believes that they might get out of this alive.

But not without loss.

Foyet has a gleeful look on his face, as if this is playing out exactly as he had expected. He doesn’t take his eyes off Morgan as he lets his hand run across Emily’s cheek.

‘You watched your Unit Chief die – are you ready to watch your friend die too?’

‘Not a chance,’ Morgan spits, and there’s blood in his saliva, which explains why his mouth feels so funny.

Foyet shrugs. ‘I was going to suggest…You tell me to kill her, and I will put a bullet in her skull, and I will let you go. You tell me not to, and I torture her until she wishes she was dead, and then I’ll let you go anyway. How does that sound?’

Morgan’s breath catches in his throat. There’s only one way he can do this, and that’s if Foyet is distracted.

‘Derek,’ Emily says in a voice that’s so weak and yet so strong and the same time; part of him wants nothing more than to acquiesce to her silent plea, but he can’t. Not if he can get her out of this alive.

‘Don’t kill her,’ he whispers, and it’s the most difficult thing he has ever said in his life. He sees Emily’s eyes widen, and he sees the look of surprise in Foyet’s – as though this is what he’d really wanted, only it’s not what he’d expected Morgan to choose. In a way, it’s win-win, for the Reaper – either way, he gets Morgan to make the impossible choice, only Morgan knows something he doesn’t. He knows about the bullet.

Foyet turns around, and Morgan edges back towards the gun. Emily looks at him, understanding slowly dawning. She doesn’t know about the bullet, but she knows him well enough to realize that he has something planned. Part of that is profiling, and part of that is the near unbreakable bond that comes from spending almost every single waking hour with your colleagues.

Emily bites her lip, and keeps the despair etched upon her face. If Foyet suspects that something is wrong, then they’re both as dead as Hotch. He tries not to look at the body.

There’s no way he can get over to the gun without arousing suspicion, so he does the next best thing. He charges Foyet again, and takes the subsequent blow, making sure he lets himself fall just that little bit closer.

‘Derek!’ Emily calls again, and it’s followed by a raw, unfettered scream as Foyet shoves a cattle prod into her neck. She tries to breathe, choking on each mouthful of air, and Morgan’s heart might as well be breaking, because he can’t stand to see his friends in pain like this. It’s bad enough when it’s over a video link, or through a bug, but being here…It hurts. Knowing that he’s already too late for Hotch hurts even more.

He remembers the first time the team had encountered the Reaper, the way he had enjoyed spending time with his female victims. That, he can use to his advantage. While Foyet had started off trying to make this about Morgan, there’s going to be a point where he’s so engrossed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t notice Derek Morgan picking up the gun, and loading it. He won’t even hear the bang.

Morgan closes his eyes at the next scream, fists clenching. When he opens them, Foyet is looking the other way, and he extends a shaky hand towards the gun. His other hand, he slips into his pocket and pulls out the bullet. He’s half afraid that it will be the wrong caliber, or unusable for some other reason, but the Reaper rarely does anything that doesn’t have significance. He wouldn’t have given Morgan a bullet that hadn’t been from one of his own guns.

At the sound of the next scream, he loads the gun, trying to dissociate himself. Emily, to her credit, has kept her gaze on Foyet, which makes things easier for the both of them.

‘Foyet,’ Morgan breathes, and the Reaper turns around as Derek raises the gun, and for a second, their eyes are locked.

‘You already tried that once, Derek,’ he says, grinning. ‘It didn’t work out so well.’

‘Do you remember…when we first met,’ Morgan says, his words coming slowly. He’s going to pass out soon enough, but he needs to do this first. ‘Do you remember what you gave me?’

Foyet’s eyes widen, and Morgan’s finger squeezes the trigger. He hears that satisfying _bang_ as the Reaper falls backwards, a bullet through his left eye. That all-seeing eye won’t see anything anymore.

He’s over there in a second, kicking the cattle prod out of the way, even though Foyet is stone cold dead. Emily’s eyes are open, and her breath is coming in short, fast, gulps. Foyet’s body is half on top of her, his arm lying across her stomach – between them, they managed to push him off. ‘Nice shot with the Black Arrow there, Bard,’ she quips, but her voice is emotionless. She gets to her knees, hands still cuffed tightly behind her back.

‘You okay?’ Morgan asks, voice strained.

‘Hell of a question, Derek,’ she replies, shaking her head. ‘I’m alive. That’s enough for now.’

She’s right, he knows; he doesn’t think that any of them are going to be alright after today. He finds the key to the handcuffs, and frees her hands. She rubs her wrists, the skin raw.

They’re both looking pointedly _away_ from Hotch, but she lets a hand run across the sticky blood on her face anyway. There’s a tense moment of silence.

‘We can’t leave Hotch in here with…with _him_,’ she says, voice distant. Death is a hard thing to accept within the first few minutes, and everything has happened very, very quickly.

Running mostly on adrenaline, they manage to find the strength to drag Foyet into another room, because it would feel disrespectful to disturb Hotch right now. Maybe they can find a sheet, or something…

‘We need to find a phone,’ Emily says authoritatively, and Morgan wonders if she’s just boxed everything away. Short-term, it’s useful, because they can’t really do anything if they’re busy having a breakdown, but long-term, it’s probably less so.

He doesn’t argue.

Morgan steps out of the room, feeling completely and utterly naked without a gun in his hand. None of their service weapons are anywhere to be seen, and the revolver is out of bullets. It is ridiculously unlikely that there’s anyone hiding in a dark, shadowy corner, waiting to jump out and slit is throat, but after the disproportionate amount of misfortune that’s hit them today, he’s feeling a little bit jumpy. He’d had his cell phone on him when Foyet had ambushed them, but he’s not sure whether it would have been destroyed to prevent tracing. Eventually, he finds the stash of disposable pre-paid cells that does not surprise him in the least.

When he returns, Emily’s covering Hotch’s body with a sheet, muttering something under her breath. A prayer, he realizes, the moment he’s within hearing range. Derek Morgan doesn’t hold much stock in prayer today.

‘Found a phone,’ he says, holding it up. Emily’s face breaks into a sad smile.

‘I guess it’s time to call in the cavalry.’

They huddle together closely, holding each other up, as the call goes through. Then, he hears Penelope Garcia’s voice, and damned if it isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world.

‘_Speak quickly, mortal, I haven’t got all day._’

‘Put me on speakerphone, baby girl. Then we’ll see how long you’ve got.’

‘_Derek?! Oh my god! Are you okay? Are Hotch and Emily with you? Please tell me you’re okay._’

He hears the cacophony in the background, and then the clatter as someone apparently manages to find the speakerphone button.

‘_Okay, hot stuff, you have Rossi, the Goddess of all Truth, and two very stubborn Supervisory Special Agents who should both still be in hospital on the line._’

‘Foyet’s dead,’ Morgan reveals. ‘He won’t be bothering us anymore.’

‘_Do you have Hotch and Emily with you?_’ Rossi asks, and there’s a long, deadly silence. Morgan looks towards Emily.

‘I’m here,’ Emily chokes out, her voice starting to crack. She wraps her arms around herself, half-shivering. Hotch…’

 ‘Hotch is dead,’ Morgan says, the reality of the situation starting to sink in properly. Aaron Hotchner, their boss – their _friend _– is dead. The line crackles, but no-one speaks. He thinks he hears a sob, but still, no-one speaks.

Morgan closes his eyes, tears starting to fall. He almost misses the response when it does come.

‘_Stay where you are,_’ Rossi says. ‘_We’re on our way._’


	40. Saints and Sinners

Chapter Fourteen – Saints and Sinners (Rossi)

The sirens blare, even though they don’t really matter anymore.

It’s all over.

Foyet is dead.

Hotch is dead.

The rest of the team is safe.

Relatively speaking.

He pulls to a dangerously uneven stop outside the house. Just a regular, suburban house. “FOR SALE” says the sign in the front yard, surrounded by neatly trimmed hedges.

Sitting on the front step are Derek Morgan and Emily Prentiss. They look like they’ve been through hell. Morgan has been beaten up pretty badly, and there’s blood splatter on Emily’s face. Something dark inside of him says that it isn’t her blood.

Her head rests against Morgan’s shoulder, and he has his arm around her. It’s a quiet moment, that he almost doesn’t want to interrupt.

They stand, as he unbuckles his seatbelt. The passenger’s side door has slammed before he can even say anything, and Penelope Garcia has run over to wrap her two friends in what looks like it’s going to be the world’s longest bear hug.

JJ and Reid had stayed behind at the police station. As much as they’d wanted to come, this…this is too much. Rossi had ordered them both back to the hospital.

Too much for all of them, really.

‘Do you need an ambulance?’ Rossi says, trying to keep his composure. He’s an old pro at this. It shouldn’t be so difficult not to break down. It’s something that he should have asked before getting here, but then, he’d arranged for one anyway. He just wants to hear them say it.

_You can break down later_.

Garcia pulls away suddenly, as if afraid she might have made their injuries worse. Morgan gives Emily a quick look.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Probably,’ and the mere fact that he’s willing to admit that makes Rossi realize just how close they had come to losing two more agents.

‘How did you do it?’ Garcia asks, breathless. ‘Foyet wouldn’t just…’ She gives an awkward gesture. ‘Let you…you know…’

‘I shot him,’ he says shortly. When Garcia’s expression becomes even more confused, he adds, a little evasively, ‘It’s a long story.’ Rossi wonders if it’s the kind of “long story” that means he doesn’t want to tell Garcia about it. If nothing else, it will be in their official reports, so there’s no way they can keep any of it from Garcia.

It hits him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer the moment he steps inside the house.

His best friend is _dead_.

Now that it’s all over, he can process that fact properly. Crying at a crime scene isn’t exactly the kind of behavior that the general public expects of an FBI agent, but screw the public. And when the reporters came, like vultures. Well, he’d deal with that when it happened.

The house is empty, and it smells like death.

He finds Foyet’s body first, single gunshot wound through his eye. After everything they’ve been through, it doesn’t quite seem enough.

He lingers at the door of the next room, not particularly wanting to step inside. No matter what he wants, though, it was something that he _needs _to do.

A sheet covers the body, specks of crimson starting to seep through. He wonders if it had been Morgan or Emily that had put it there. Probably Emily.

His stomach roils.

Looking, he can tell exactly how it had gone down. Gun to the back of the skull, with a decent sized bullet. Not a pretty way to die. Not that any way of dying is particularly dignified. But this one seems so much worse. Maybe because it’s Aaron Hotchner, the man that seems to starch even his boxer shorts.

This isn’t Hotch. Not anymore.

He replaces the sheet, and goes back outside to his team.

He must’ve spent longer inside than he’d realized, because when he returns, there’s an ambulance in the driveway, attending to both Morgan and Prentiss. Morgan has a lot of cuts and bruises, but it’s Emily that looks worse for wear. Morgan says something to the paramedic as he puts a stethoscope to her chest.

They’ll at least have to stay overnight at the hospital, he figures. With JJ and Reid going back, too, they might as well have a god damn slumber party.

‘Sir?’ Garcia says. Rossi looks over to see her eyes shining with tears.

‘I’m not going to stop you, if it’s what you really want,’ he tells her. ‘But I…_strongly_ discourage you from looking at what’s inside that house.’

Her lips quiver, and she steels herself, nodding. He doubts that she would have anyway. It’s not that she isn’t strong – Penelope Garcia is one of the strongest people he knows. It’s just that her strength is different.

‘There’s nothing we can do here, is there?’ she asks, and Rossi shakes his head. The coroner will come and take the bodies away, and a forensic unit will do a sweep, but really all of that can be handled by the Boston Police Department. They don’t _need_ to be here, and yet it feels like a betrayal to leave.

The ambulance leaves with Morgan and Prentiss, but Rossi waits until the coroner’s van arrives. Garcia hangs back, anxious.

‘It doesn’t feel right,’ she says, softly. ‘Putting them in the same van together.’ It doesn’t, but save from demanding that they bring another one to the scene, there really isn’t anything they can do about it.

There are two black body bags carried from the house, and Rossi can’t tell the difference.

They drive to the hospital in silence. At one point, Rossi realizes that he should call Haley, but it’s not a call that he wants to make.

He knows that they had never stopped loving one another. That’s the most heartbreaking thing of all.

Second-most, actually. Jack might be a little too young to understand what death really means, but it will still be a harrowing experience.

‘You go inside,’ he instructs Garcia, as they park the SUV. As temporary team leader, it’s his duty to do the dirty jobs. The jobs that no-one ever really knows are being done. ‘I’ve got to make some phone calls.’

He takes a deep breath, and dials.


	41. You May Say I'm a Dreamer

Chapter Fifteen – You May Say I’m a Dreamer (Prentiss)

The hospital ride is mostly silent; in the end, there’s not a lot to say.

Foyet killed Hotch. Morgan killed Foyet.

Really, They haven’t said much to each other since leaving the house, but Emily knows that the words will come eventually.

Whether it’s in two days when they’re back in Virginia, or in two weeks, when they’re back at work. One day, the words will come. Right now, the silence is fitting.

Emily clenches her eyes shut, and tries to ignore the throbbing pain in her head. Pragmatically speaking, there’s no way she should have gone on the last raid, but she shudders to think what might have happened if she hadn’t been there.

It might be Hotch in the ambulance with her instead, and Morgan in the body bag. It might be both of them dead. It might be Rossi, or some of the local police. There’s no way of knowing how it would have turned out. Maybe better. Maybe worse. Maybe exactly the same.

When the ambulance finally reaches the hospital, the paramedics move her out on the gurney, and Emily is far too tired to argue. Morgan is a little more stubborn about it, but then, he’s Morgan, so it’s not surprising.

It’s a long night, to say the least. There are tests and scans and sutures and the only company is the ever-changing array of doctors and nurses as she’s shifted between departments. It’s her second overnight hospital stay in as many days, and she’s almost positive there’s a look of exasperation on some of their faces.

But those aren’t the faces she cares about.

She cares about JJ and Reid, both of whom came a hell of a lot closer to death than she did, and yet still find the energy to be waiting by her bed. She cares about Morgan, who is like a goddamn pillar of strength in the way he gives his reassuring smile. She cares about Rossi, who looks like he’s walked through the fires of hell, but would never had let anyone else make that phone call. She cares about Garcia, who hugs more tightly than anyone else that Emily knows.

Will is standing by the door, and Emily quite likes the man, but he seems like an outsider. This is their own, private grief.

The room isn’t exactly a big one, but they all manage to squeeze inside, like the oddly mismatched family that they are.

But there’s a wide, gaping hole.

Hotch should be there with them, a look on his face that’s somehow simultaneously deep and stoic. His death is the wound that will hurt the most.

Emily tries so hard not to think about it. She closes her eyes and leans back in what is probably one of the more uncomfortable hospital beds she’s had the opportunity to sleep on. The light hurts her eyes, so she slams them shut.

It’s not late, but her body is exhausted. She wants to sleep, but she can’t. The doctors want to keep her under observation for a little while longer first. Garcia has apparently taken it upon herself to stop Emily from falling asleep until it’s safe.

‘I thought that was a myth,’ she says with a yawn. ‘That I can’t sleep with a concussion.’

‘It is,’ Reid confirms from his wheelchair. He winces as he talks, but keeps going anyway. ‘But it’s suggested that patients should be kept awake for some time first, in addition to being woken up frequently.’

‘Great,’ Emily mutters.

‘But it should also be noted that the issues from even a mild concussion can take up to two weeks to clear – any further injury within this period could cause permanent brain damage. Statistically speaking, you’re lucky you didn’t end up with Second-impact Syndrome.’

She stares at him, and he gives a small shrug, followed by another wince. Realistically speaking, he should be back in bed, if not with morphine then some other sedative. But Reid is just as stubborn as the rest of them.

They stay together for as long as possible, but eventually – today has been so much of a testament to that – eventually, they have to break apart. JJ and Reid return to their own rooms, both exhausted, judging by their faces. Morgan has his own bed just feet away, but it still feels too far. Rossi and Garcia are both reluctant to leave, but they do, in the end.

‘How’s the head?’ Morgan asks, when it’s just the two of them left.

‘Sore,’ she replies. ‘How’s the body?’

‘Ripped.’

Emily laughs. It hurts like hell, but she does it anyway, because she needs to. Because a couple of hours ago, she wasn’t really sure that she’d ever laugh again.

When she sleeps, her dreams are vivid. Not quite nightmares, but still worse than dreams. Then, her definition of the word “nightmare” has changed, considering the kind of things that happen during her waking hours.

At least the dreams are something she _can_ wake up from.


	42. Vigil

Chapter Sixteen – Vigil (Reid)

Every single case they take leaves a mark – physical _and_ mental. Sometimes it’s a small wound, when they’ve been running for three days on nothing but coffee and carbohydrates. Nutritionists recommend that 45 – 65% of daily intake should come from carbohydrates, but Reid probably wouldn’t call day old pastries a properly balanced diet.

Sometimes, the wounds are big, like when half the team ends up in hospital, and the Unit Chief is in a body bag. A crass description, perhaps, but for Reid, sentimentality has been in short supply these last few days.

Now, they’re all at Rossi’s house, partially for convenience, and partially – Reid thinks – so than none of them have to mourn this loss alone.

It’s been four days, and the pain is as bad as it had been four days ago.

Rossi, Garcia and Will are keeping them all drowning in food; from the living room, Reid can hear the arguments about exactly why they have to use beef in Italian beef sandwiches, instead of some vegetarian alternative.

Reid drinks water – partially because he’s still on a variety of medications, and partially because he doesn’t think that he could stomach alcohol at all anyway. It might dull the pain somewhat, but right now, the pain is something that he needs. The itching and the stinging and the general aching of his chest distracts him from the tingling of his veins, and the urge to find a way to make it all just stop.

It might have been harder, if he were alone.

He taps his fingers against the leather of the couch. Expensive leather – only the best for millionaire, David Rossi. On the floor in front of him, Jack has engaged Morgan and Prentiss in some kind of complicated role-playing scenario involving Batman, Captain America, and a stuffed bear named Mr. Crinkles.

When Haley had asked that the team keep an eye on Jack while she organizes Hotch’s affairs, both profilers had risen to the request. It doesn’t take someone with a background in behavioral science to see the reasons for that eagerness. Guilt is something that they’re all feeling; if they’d done things just a little differently, then would Hotch still be alive?

That’s just another example of chaos theory in practice.

On the sofa beside him, JJ bounces Henry on her knee. The young boy is enthralled by all the people, seemingly unconcerned by the air of melancholy. He laughs as Morgan’s Mr. Crinkles tackles Jack’s Captain America, much to the five-year-old’s disapproval.

‘That’s not how you play the game,’ he protests, but he’s smiling, which is more than anyone else can claim.

He knows that his daddy had been killed by a bad man, but Reid’s not entirely sure that Jack _understands _it. He’s at the age where he’s beginning to realize that death is not some reversible, temporary thing.

All things die. Some things sooner than others.

‘Hey.’ JJ gives him a soft smile. ‘How’re you doing?’

_I’m fine_, he almost says, but it’s so far from the truth that she would never believe him in a million years.

‘About as well as everyone else,’ he says, with a shrug. Henry, sensing the need to change the focus of his attention, makes a sound of glee, and waves his arms in Spencer’s direction.

‘Not now, sweetie,’ JJ tells him. ‘Uncle Spence is still a little sore.’ He finds it amusing, considering that he’s not the only one with stitches. Granted, JJ has a lot fewer stitches than he does. ‘How’re you feeling, Spence?’ she adds, voice laced with concern. He wonders if she’s thinking about Tobias Hankel. This time, splitting up had landed both of them in hospital.

Not that things would have been any better if they’d stuck together. Carson had been a big threat, but it was Foyet that had done the real, irreversible damage. He’s not talking about the Eye of Providence. It’s not something he would have asked for, but it’s something that he can deal with.

‘I’m not sure,’ Reid says with a frown. His mind is a little jittery, but that’s to be expected. The characteristic symptoms resulting from the exposure to the extreme trauma include persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic, persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal.

There’s a world of difference between Hankel and Foyet, but that doesn’t make reliving the worst experience of his life any more desirable.

His fist clenches in pain.

There’s a pause.

‘I’m not okay,’ he says, and it’s the hardest thing in the world for him to admit. He’s used to being self-sufficient, to not relying on anyone else, but if there’s one thing that he’s learnt from being in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, it’s that you can’t hide anything.

‘I’m not either,’ she says, her voice high, and just a little bit shaky. There are tears in her eyes. Another pause. ‘I don’t think any of us will be.’

Will be.

Future tense.

JJ hesitates, as though there’s something she wants to say, only she’s not quite sure how to say it. ‘I don’t know if I can come back to the team.’

Reid nods. The revelation does not surprise him – he knows that JJ loves her job, but he also knows that she needs to do what’s best for her son, and that means being in a position that has a lower mortality rate.

‘Where will you go?’ he asks, softly.

‘I’m not sure,’ JJ shrugs. She gives a short laugh. ‘The Department of Defense keeps trying to recruit me. Maybe I’ll give them a call.’

Reid nods. He’s thought about making the same choice over the past couple of days, but in all honesty, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Las Vegas had ceased being a home once he had institutionalized his mother, and while he still visits when he can, he will never move back there.

He could get a teaching job, or a research job, or practically anything else under the sun. Three Ph. Ds is nothing to laugh at, and there have certainly been enough offers, but he can’t see himself leaving the BAU anytime soon.

Afternoon trickles into evening, and nobody leaves. Partially because of the fact that they all need the company, but mostly because of the underlying feeling that anyone who gets separated from the group will accidently fall into a ditch and break their neck.

Baseless, perhaps, but not uncommon.

The realm of the Fisher King has become a wasteland.

It will last a few days, perhaps a few weeks, before they fall back into their regular routines. Within time, they will gain some semblance of normality, but things will never quite be the same.

There’s a hole in the world.


	43. Wherever You Roam

Chapter Seventeen – Wherever You Roam (Morgan)

The day before the funeral, Morgan gets a phone call.

They’ve got another two weeks before they’re due back at work, so it’s not a case, but apparently it’s not something he can get out of, either. So he tells Strauss’s assistant that he’ll be in at two, which gives him enough time to sort out the other errands he’d planned for the day.

Clooney is overjoyed at the prospect of a bath, but somehow, Morgan’s the one that ends up covered in soap and water. He spends another hour after that tearing around the backyard, making the bath pointless anyway. Morgan had had his own shower not long after waking up, but he’ll probably have another one before making the drive into Quantico, because while he doesn’t know the content of the meeting, he does know that it’s probably not a good idea to show up in mud-streaked jeans.

So he showers and dresses respectably enough for a meeting with the Section Chief – blue long-sleeved button up shirt, and dark slacks, but no tie, and no jacket. If he’s going to get chewed out for letting Foyet get the drop on them, then he’s at least going to be comfortable doing it.

Vaguely, he wonders if any other members of the team are being called in.

Aside from the requisite paperwork, Strauss had kept her distance since Hotch’s death. A calm before the storm.

The emotional fallout from the case had been one thing, but Morgan gets the idea that the occupational fallout might be just as bad. He already knows that JJ plans on tendering her resignation, and he wonders if anyone else might follow suit.

He gets there about half an hour early, which is enough time to pick up some paperwork from his desk that he can work on during their leave. After the funeral, who knows when he’ll be back in the office again.

The elevator ride up to Strauss’s office is as silent as the car ride over had been. Jessie – Strauss’s assistant – gives him a sympathetic smile as he enters. Another day, he might have given her a wink, and his trademark charming grin, but not today.

‘She’s ready for you now, Agent Morgan,’ Jessie informs him. Morgan nods, not quite sure why he feels queasy all of a sudden. Strauss has never intimidated him, but he sure as hell doesn’t want to deal with any of her shit today.

‘Come in,’ Strauss says, as he knocks on the open door. ‘Take a seat.’

He hesitates, but sits down. She doesn’t sound angry. If anything, she sounds upset. Morgan’s not sure if he’d describe the relationship between Strauss and Hotch as friendly, but that doesn’t mean she’s not allowed to grieve for the loss.

‘I’m sorry for calling you in like this, Agent Morgan, but my superiors are insistent on resolving this situation as quickly as possible.’ Her voice is the epitome of stoic professionalism, now. Morgan raises an eyebrow.

_Situation?_

‘What situation?’ he asks, still not entirely certain he’s not about to lose his job.

‘The unfortunate circumstances surrounding your previous case has left a void that needs filling,’ she says. ‘It is my belief – and the belief of those above me – that your experience in the BAU makes you the best candidate for the job.’ It takes Morgan a few seconds to process what Strauss is saying.

‘You want _me_ to be the new Unit Chief?’ he asks, incredulous. This is absolutely not what he’d expected out of the meeting today. He’d known that the issue would have come up eventually, but he’d just assumed that Rossi would take over the role. ‘Why me? Why not Rossi, or Prentiss? They’re way more suited to the role than I am.’

He’s not the guy in charge.

He’s never been the guy in charge.

He’s the guy that does the heavy lifting, the guy that takes point in the field. He can’t imagine doing the things that Hotch does – that Hotch _did_. He can’t imagine dealing with Bureau politics, or going to budget meetings once a month.

It’s not him.

‘I’ve already discussed this with Agent Rossi, and he agrees with my assessment,’ Strauss tells him. ‘While you may lack political and administrative experience, your tenure in the BAU has done more than enough to prove that you’re capable of professional development.’

There’s a long silence.

‘How long do I have to decide?’ he asks, and Strauss gives him a look of surprise.

‘Would you really turn this offer down?’ she asks, and Morgan isn’t entirely sure how to answer. What Strauss is offering is a far preferable alternative to bringing someone new in. Even with the inevitable changes, the team dynamic is not something that can really be taught to a newcomer.

A newcomer would dismiss Garcia’s skills based on her appearance and personality. A newcomer would make light of Reid’s encyclopedic memory. A newcomer would….a newcomer would not be Hotch, and really, that’s the most important thing. Some days, Morgan thinks that Hotch is the glue that holds the team together.

Without him…

Well, time will tell.

‘Just…give me a couple of days,’ he says, and Strauss can’t exactly say no.

She nods, with a terse, ‘Of course.’ With those words is the unspoken approval for him to leave, which he does quickly, his mind racing.

Hotch’s job is not something that he wants.

What he _wants_ is for George Foyet to have never escaped prison. What he _wants_ is for Aaron Hotchner to still be alive, but neither of those things happened, so now he has to make the best of a shitty situation.

Right now, going home isn’t an option, so he drives.

There’s a list of pros and cons that could be made, but Derek Morgan has never been a pros and cons kind of guy. He thinks with his gut and with his heart, and right now, both of those are in turmoil.

He’s been driving for almost an hour – mostly in circles – when he realizes that he’s about ten minutes from Emily’s apartment. Maybe that was something that his brain had done subconsciously, because she’s the only person that he can really talk to about this, because she’s the one that had been with him at the end.

He makes a stop for lunch first, knowing that the conversation will be easier – less awkward – over food.

When she answers the door, it’s with a raised eyebrow. The smell of burgers had probably wafted through.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

‘Double cheeseburger with jalapenos and onion rings, and a Chocolate Peanut Butter Pecan shake,’ he answers, handing her the paper bag and cup.

‘It’s three-thirty in the afternoon,’ Emily says pointedly, but takes the bag anyway. ‘Do you really pay that much attention to what kind of burgers I like?’ she asks, before shaking her head. ‘Right. Profiler. Forget I said anything.’

She leads him over to her kitchen table, which is currently home to her laptop and a mess of strewn paperwork. Apparently he’s not the only one who’s been working from home.

‘Every time I stop, and think about what happened, I break down,’ she tells him, evidently following his gaze. ‘It’s easier just to keep busy.’

‘I feel ya,’ he agrees, because after all, that’s the main reason why his kitchen and bathroom are completely spotless for the first time in six months.

A calm silence washes over them as they eat; Morgan doesn’t say anything when Emily steals a couple of his fries, but she tosses a handful of onion rings onto his plate anyway.

‘Screw dieting,’ she says with a laugh, but it’s a little empty.

He’s halfway through his burger before he tells her. ‘Strauss wants me to lead the team.’

‘Seriously?’ Emily asks, but she doesn’t look that surprised. ‘You gonna say yes?’

‘Was thinking about it,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I just…I don’t know if I can be a good leader the way he was.’

‘For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure the entire team would follow you to hell and back without hesitation,’ Emily tells him.

‘That’s kinda what I’m afraid of,’ he admits. ‘Four of us ended up in hospital, and Hotch didn’t even get that courtesy; Next time it happens, it’s on my watch. I don’t know if I can live with that burden.’

Emily’s distant for a few seconds, hands fidgeting with a stray onion ring. ‘I ever tell you what I did before joining the BAU?’

He frowns, because he _does _know, and it’s not exactly something that’s been kept secret.

 ‘St. Louis and Chicago Field Offices, right?’

Emily shakes her head, and her next words are most definitely _not_ the ones he had been expecting.

‘I spent six years in the CIA doing undercover work to profile terrorists.’

‘No kidding,’ he says, stunned. He’s shocked by the revelation, not to mention a little bit hurt.

‘Well, it’s technically classified, so I’m not supposed to be telling you, but screw that.’ She takes the onion ring and examines it closely before eating it. ‘If there’s one thing I learnt from that, it’s that sometimes, you have to do things you _really_, _really_ don’t want to do, because the alternative is just too hard to handle. Maybe being Unit Chief means that whatever happens is on your shoulders, but it also means that you have the freedom to make those impossible decisions in the first place. I don’t know,’ she shrugs. ‘Maybe I’m just full of shit.’

‘Out of all the things I could accuse you of, being full of shit is not one of them,’ Morgan tells her. ‘So what about you? Are you staying with the team?’

‘Well, somebody has to make sure your ego doesn’t get too big,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘And to make sure you don’t end up strangling Strauss in righteous fury.’

Morgan gives a sad sort of grin. ‘You don’t think anyone else is up to the task?’

‘Maybe,’ she concedes. ‘But the difference is that I’ll never stop watching your back.’

‘Baby, if you want to check out my ass, you just have to ask.’ Emily rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, and for a moment it feels like they have the same kind of dynamic that had been there before Hotch’s death.

‘Thanks for the burger,’ she says quietly. ‘And thanks for the company.’

He gives her a hug as he leaves, and waits until he’s back in his car before he pulls out his phone.

‘Strauss?’ he says, when she answers. ‘I’ll do it.’

She sounds pleased, but not overly surprised, and they organize another meeting for next week. There, he’ll get an idea of exactly the kind of duties that will be expected of him and just how difficult Hotch’s job had been.

There’s a long, hard road ahead, but Morgan knows that he will never be alone.


	44. The Round Table

_ ‘After the torchlight red on sweaty faces  
After the frosty silence in the gardens  
After the agony in stony places  
The shouting and the crying  
Prison and palace and reverberation  
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains  
He who was living is now dead  
We who were living are now dying  
With a little patience.’_

**T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land**

_‘_ _The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.’_

**Lois McMaster Bujold**

Epilogue – The Round Table (Other)

It’s May, and the sun shines high in the sky.

The team are almost uniformly dressed in black, the only exception being Reid’s charcoal gray suit with purple shirt. They’re clustered together, as though being apart might somehow break all of them.

Morgan doesn’t recognize two-thirds of the people here – there’s Haley and Jack, of course, as well as a woman with curly blond hair that must be Haley’s sister, and there are a fair few cops and agents that the team has worked with at one point or another. Haley’s eyes are red and wet with tears – whatever quarrels she might have had with Hotch in life, they seem almost diminished in death. Whatever else had happened between them, a lack of love was not what had broken their marriage apart.

The rest must be extended family, and friends, and colleagues from the past. Even Strauss is there, keeping herself noticeably distant from everyone else. Morgan ignores the looks that people keep shooting in their direction. The job is what got Hotch killed, it’s not surprising that they might want to lay the blame on his colleagues.

 

 

Since Rossi’s the only one out of them that’s actually speaking, they take a row near the back. Morgan puts his arm around Garcia, who is already crying silently.

Like always, they persevere, even if they’ll mourn properly in their own way.

They don’t even have to discuss the matter to know that they’ll all be going straight from the cemetery to Rossi’s house. Nobody wants to be alone right now, and the fact that Rossi has the best stock of alcohol and the most space means that going anywhere else just seems silly.

An hour later, they’re sitting around the dining room table, each with a glass of scotch. Morgan isn’t usually one to drink scotch, but the drink isn’t really for him anyway.

‘To Hotch.’ Their voices are a little out of sync, a little warbled, but by no means insincere. More than anyone else, Hotch is the glue that had held the team together.

Without him...

There’s more drinking, and more reminiscing, and an awful lot of long, pained silences. Reid, being Reid, is the one who decides to compare the situation to some variety of classical literature (though that might be the hard cider).

‘When the Fisher King was wounded, his kingdom suffered – deteriorating into a wasteland. Many knights came to try and heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen one could succeed.’

‘Somehow I don’t think anyone’s gonna come along and heal the magic kingdom, Reid,’ Morgan says, frowning.

‘I didn’t think someone whose main disciplines were sciences would be so big on allegories,’ Emily adds.

‘My mother studied the Arthurian legend,’ he tells her. ‘She read the various stories to me a lot.’

‘Well, I have always said that we’re the Knights of the Round Table,’ Garcia says.

‘Though somewhat lacking in sword-fighting skills,’ JJ reminds her.

‘Right. And how did King Arthur die again?’

‘He was killed in the Battle of Camlann,’ Reid provides, to nobody’s surprise. ‘By Mordred.’

Morgan’s grateful then, that the discussion does not degenerate into further dissection of recent events. Beneath the light-heartedness, the events of the last few weeks will be on their minds for years to come.

...

_Six weeks later._

This is it.

Their first case back, together, as a team.

After sick leave, and bereavement leave, and a hell of a lot of paperwork, they’ve all filed into the briefing room, sitting at that round table.

Reid’s body still feels stiff, the scars pulling as he walks. He hasn’t taken his field requalification yet, and he’s not sure he really wants to.

Morgan’s dressed in a suit and tie, and he looks more uncomfortable than Reid has ever seen him. Part of that is probably due to his tendency to be wearing jeans and a muscle shirt, but it’s mostly due to the fact that in his eyes, Hotch will always be the Unit Chief, (even if, technically speaking, Gideon had been in that role before him). Reid knows that there is a pile of applications on his desk that he’s avoiding.

A heavy silence falls over the group.

This is it.

‘JJ?’ Morgan asks, and JJ gives a nod. She takes her pointer, and starts the presentation.

‘Portland, Oregon – two teenage boys were found dumped in a park on the city’s northside...’

And just like that, they’re back to work.

But things will never be the same again.

 

 


End file.
